


Shit is Fucked Up!

by Royalrastafariannaynays



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Camping, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gen, M/M, Music, POV Dave Strider, POV Karkat Vantas, Past Abuse, Photography, Polyamorous Character, Polyamory, Recreational Drug Use, Road Trips, Slow Burn, Trolls on Earth, both of em, heavy metal to be specific, im talking like, referenced use of hard drugs, wet leaves slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2019-06-28 23:23:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15717201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Royalrastafariannaynays/pseuds/Royalrastafariannaynays
Summary: Dave's been dragged to a music festival by his good friend, Aradia. And he absolutely only sorta wants to be there. But everything changes when he meets a Tasmanian devil of a guy in a line for the shittiest beer known to man.





	1. Chapter 1

When Aradia invited you to take the extra ticket and backstage pass, you didn’t really think about the type of crowd that would be there. It’s dismal enough that one of your best friends had to explain what Warped Tour was to you, but even worse that she didn’t bother dressing you for the occasion. 

So here you are, floundering through crowds, trying to follow the girl you met in Anthropology class (years ago) around the soggy fields and sweaty bodies. And you’re dressed kind of like a rejected extra from the shitty part of District 12 in the Hunger Games, hit series go and see it now and interpret it the way you like or something something. 

Stepping through a thick cloud of weed smoke, you exit a throng, and, wheezing a little, catch her by the upper arm. Her horns nearly clock you as she whips around, glee on every surface of her face and short shorts nearly busting open with the force that her incredibly great ass expels like an underwater volcano. Her words, not yours. Trust me. 

“Yeah!” she says, like she can’t see you panting after finally finding an area of the grounds that isn’t teeming with people a million times edgier dressed than you. Two strikes on the social awkwardness scale, eight more to go until the umpire just straight up shoots you out of pity alone. 

“Just wait, gotta,” you pant, “Gotta get a… beer?” 

“You just named the first thing you saw that would let you stand around like a complete loser,” she says, eyes devoid of pretty much any emotion. It’s normal for her. 

Her pupils are also sideways, like a fuckin goat, so you gave up a long time ago at taking her at anything but surface value. 

“Yeah well you go I guess, and I’ll get a drink,” you say, giving her a shove. She shoves you back, ten times as hard, and then laughs about it when you wince. Hm. Aradia. 

“Y’know, Damara would have been thrilled to run around with me,” she teases, sticking her tongue out at you. 

Yeah well whatever. You frown at her. 

“Damara is home with the flu or whatever she’s got this time,” you say, the same words you’ve been saying every time she teases you and totally doesn’t mean it. “So you have me.” 

She starts walking backwards into the crowd, pointing toward a stage you hadn’t noticed before. Essentially, the mass of trolls and humans is excited and chatty and you can just _barely_ make out this twisty, too-edgy-looking banner across the stage backdrop in the distance that reads ‘Castejacket.’ Aradia disappears in a flounce of too much hair and teeth right as the people flood into the stage area. 

It’s empty out in this random little concession area faster than you could say ‘I hate crowds so much, why did I come here.’ Empty, aside from you, four guys in front of you at the beer stand, three high-pitched human girls who are clearly on molly trying to figure out a port-a-john door, and the concession guy. 

Who looks very bored. 

Cue a wait that takes entirely too long. 

So you lift your camera from your chest, take off the lens, and look around for good photos to take. 

While you’re in that line, the take-a-break excuse line, you find a few things. A cute bug on your sleeve, is one. A dick-shaped footprint in front of you is another. Various stands and remnants of trash and the tired-looking janitorial staff just trying to very much not care about their situation. 

It takes entirely too long, but it’s long enough to catch your breath, and long enough to decompress from the diseased masses. 

And then, you hear it. 

God, it’s beautiful. 

It’s the sound of an angry customer. 

And what good are you, if not for the high-definition pictures of angry shoppers on your main twitter account. It’s what you’re known for on there. It’s why you have about two hundred thousand followers. The glorious, spittle-coated, sale-induced photos of people who are torturing the poor retail workers who are just trying to communicate that your toys r us coupon doesn’t work at a Walmart, Debra.

“I walked all the way over to this stand INSTEAD of the one by my bus, and you ONLY have PBR?! What the fuck!”

Your camera is already up by the time he finishes his ripsnortin’ good time with yelling at the very tired salesman behind the cardboard booth. A picture of both of them comes out beautifully on your screen, the yelling troll holding up a finger, and the other dude looking like he would really just rather eat shit. 

Problem is, the short, flustered, grey-skinned hellraiser just turns around at the sound of the shutter. He seems acutely attuned to that noise for whatever reason, since the din of the surrounding stages is almost intolerably loud. Turns around is kinda gentle, too. He whips around faster than Willow Smith, and his teeth are bared before you even take the camera away from your face. 

He’s looking you up and down, crossing his arms, and you take another picture. This one, you get his dark eyes, bright red just in the center, in perfect clarity. His glare is really a work of fucking art. Stand down Michelangelo, this dude’s eyebrows just dug up your grave and shat in it. 

“I don’t see a press badge,” he says. That furious candor directed at you feels like sandpaper gently caressing your butthole.  
“Press badge?” you ask. No one else at this festival has even cared that you’re carrying around a nice camera. Sort of nice, anyway. 

“Yes,” he huffs, bringing you to look from his wrinkled nose and down to the purse of his lips. Hm. “You need one of those to take official pictures.” 

“That’s a little funny,” you respond without thinking. Like. Why would it matter whether or not you take pictures of randos as long as they’re tasteful? 

The dude looks absolutely rankled, and if he was a cat, he’d be fluffled up, ears back, and claws ready to take a chunk out of your pale weak flesh. He’s wearing something that could barely classify as a threadbare black long sleeve tee, and some old white jeans that have definitely seen better days. You take a picture of the grass stains. 

Troll guy hisses. 

After the first one, you kinda just kept taking pics to annoy him. You’ll admit to that much, at least. 

He puts his hand in front of his face, barely covering half of it, and growls deeply at you when you raise the camera to snap a fourth shot. And a fifth. 

“Funny? What’s so funny?” he asks. “For a…”

Dude zeroes in on the lanyard you have around your neck, backstage passes proudly emblazoned in what Aradia earlier said was the ugliest orange she’d ever seen. 

“For a fan,” he starts again, in a painfully condescending tone, pushing your camera to the side so he can meet your eyes. “I don’t really get why you don’t realize the problem.”

Oh, so he’s talking to you like you’re stupid, huh? Tone, check. Eyebrows raised, check. Smarmy dickwad, check. 

Okay then. 

“I mean I don’t get why your docs are more scuffed than a rodeo clown, but not everyone can crawl out of a dumpster and call it a day.”

Dude just freezes mid-inhale. And then the worst thing ever happens. 

“What did you just say to me?” 

“Uh.” 

Fuck fuck fuck. He’s gonna find his troll friends and beat the shit out of you, probably? Maybe? Does the real world even work like that? 

“You’re supposed to be a fan, and you – “ 

“A fan of… who, exactly?” you ask. 

If he was frozen before, now, he’s absolutely arctic. Dumbstruck, arms falling, posture straightening. Like he’s looking at a grown man doing the tango naked in a Walmart. 

“You don’t know who I am.” 

He sounds like… his tone isn’t something you can place. Cause you’re not a bad novel. But it’s definitely a statement. You know that much. 

“Did we go to middle school together, or something?” you put out there. 

Sharp teeth flash as he opens his mouth, finger rising to point into your face, and then – 

“Your Pabst,” the vendor says. 

Scrubby troll turns, grabbing his beer, and leaves, just ghosting on you right there. Middle finger just pointed up, waving it around like a goddamn inflatable noodle man. 

Aradia chooses that moment to reappear, dragging you away before you can even order a drink. Her words are excited and her claws are tight on your wrist. The lens cap takes more than one try to snap back into your camera, and once that’s done you hold it in your spare hand and let yourself be pulled along into the ocean of bodies. 

\----------

It’s not until you get to the edge of the stage that you realise the crowd is mostly trolls. Like bees, swarming all over each other and conversing in so much confusing alternian that you can’t even follow it. And you were getting so much better, too. 

The mic whines with feedback as the sweaty trolls press in on you from every direction. Like that, the people hush a bit, the tension of anticipation almost like a palpable current in the air. 

And. 

Holy bugshitting fuck. 

At the mic in the front of the stage, there he is. 

It’s the Pabst Blue Ribbon troll. 

He’s leaning into the microphone, black-tipped fingers tapping on his guitar. An intense frown graces his brow, just like earlier, and he adjusts the strap holding his instrument to him. His lips caress the microphone like a lover, and you have no idea why that’s so hot. 

“Who else just chugged a shitty fucking beer?” he asks the mob. His voice is low and scratchy, like he’s been smoking for a century, and screams erupt around you. 

“Who else had to deal with a total grubfondling idiot of a meatsack today?” he asks, once it quiets a bit. A few experimental notes strum out, and he adjusts the height of his mic.

Must be fuckin’ psychic, too, cause he scans the crowd until his eyes find you. It’s probably not difficult, given that you’re a blonde in a sea of black and gray. The screams echo around your ears, half of them growling, most of them hissing, all of them carnal and full of millions of years of genetically imbedded aggression. 

And he, full of teeth.

And with his red eyes scowling directly at you.

He strums a single, loud, truly abrasive chord on his electric guitar. And he growls into the microphone like it’s the only thing that will ever bring him happiness again. 

“Just… fucking die,” he says.

The audience goes absolutely batshit, and the bassist to his left laughs into his headset.

Fuck


	2. CHAPTER TWO: BE THE CRANKY PBR GUY

_“A band?! A gobshitting band! You, Sollux, master of all of the most braindead idiots on this glubforsaken mudclod of a planet, want me to join a BAND?!”_

_“Metalcore band,” he corrects, holding a finger in the air while he looks over a line of code. He’s IT at your shitty little campus newspaper, and your computer has crashed for the umpteenth time. He did it. You know he did it. Maybe it was the email that he sent you that said ‘I’m sorry’ as the subject header, something he knew you couldn’t resist. And it crashed your fucking hard drive with a virus._

_The things your moirail does to get your attention._

_“I know you hate this job,” Sollux murmurs as he fixes something that to him would be an obvious order of operations._

_“That much is obvious, nooksack, but I kind of sort of hate every possible job known to man,” you reply, turning in your desk chair. “What makes you think I would prefer being a starving artist more than a pencil pusher?”_

_“Because the GHB is paying for all of it until we get a foothold,” he lisps, and. Damnit._

_“Why in the world would the Grand Fucking Highblood pay for our band?” you ask, despite knowing the answer._

_“Gamzee wants to be in one,” he replies, matter-of-fact, hitting the space bar on your rickety old Apple Thing, and it just. Goes away. The whole shazam. Right back to the piece of hoofbeast shit Angiey, in Obits, was peddling to you to correct for her._

_“Of course he does.”_

_So you form a band._

_There’s drama. There’s getting together and breakups and too much quadrant crap-ola for you to even **want** to deal with it anymore. There’s a member leaving and then a member joining, there’s just. Okay. Totally done listing shit. _

_Bottom line? Sollux probably only wanted you in this shit to keep Gamzee from eating everyone, and also probably to keep everyone else from killing each other, not to mention Gamzee himself all at once._

_Your talent is negligible. It’s been four fucking years and your talent is negligible and largely unimproved._

_People will always just latch onto the freshest pile of garbage they can find._

\----------

The fucking nerve. Little twerp. 

However a miniscule goddamn turd got on your private list, you’ll never know.

Nevermind that he’s taller than you. Nevermind that Vriska is most likely going to kill you (or at least threaten ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’-style) for allowing your picture to get taken. Nevermind you don’t have the patience for both your band stuff and also an insolent and slimy baby wipe full of taco shits. The grubfondler deserves to get a fistful of claws for his trouble.

On your way to the stage, you chug most of the beer. They strap a guitar to you, someone musses your hair, someone slaps more eyeliner around your eyes, and you get silently judged for all of five seconds for the state of your clothes. Then you’re striding up the stairs. The empty cup is ditched in Vriska’s hands. 

Your place of anything you could find that vaguely represents perfection is on the stage. 

Gamzee is chewing down the last of his peanut butter sandwich, and you get a whiff of shrooms on his breath when you pass him. Damnit. Not unusual, and the weed keeps the chucklevoodoos at bay, but. 

“Shrooms? Really?” you ask derisively, and he raises an eyebrow at you. He knows your set is only an hour today, and he’s gonna be feeling them in half. 

_The only reason you’re here is him._

Turning back to your mic, you decide not to think about it. 

And as you’re adjusting your strap, your eyes find a blip of yellow in a sea of monochrome and silver highlights. Standing next to a lowblood with massive horns who you remember being on the guest list, is him. The Bad Beer Idiot. God. 

Harnessing all of your anger, and all of your anxiety, and all of your frustration, you pour it into your words and scratch the strings with your filthy claws. 

And you tell him to die. 

\----------

By the time the set is over, you forget what he even did to wrong you. Through the music, you’d channeled out all of your rage, all of the heartbreak and fear. You’re walking in a kind of blur, talking aimlessly and just riding the adrenaline for a little longer before the inevitable dissipation.

Terezi walks next to you off the stage, talking excitedly with Nepeta about music shit and new ideas.

“Hey, watch out!” Nepeta says, right before you crash into one of the supports in your private tent. Sollux knows how you are after this, and he’s handing you the tablet before you can even fully register what’s happening. 

Gamzee is high as a kite, and Terezi flirts shamelessly with Vriska at the doors of the tent before people come in. 

One troll, one human. 

Before you can let everything get out of control, remembering your rage from the beer and the photos and then letting that spiral into oblivion, you’re opening your mouth and talking. 

Stuff goes by a little in a haze. People are spoken to, introduced. Sollux lays a hand on your shoulder when you feel yourself almost start spitting fire at the guy. He leads you away for a minute, and when you get back, Shit Beer Annoying Human is sitting with Terezi, and The rustblood girl is talking animatedly with everyone else. You can tell she’s got it red as a ragamuffin for Sollux, like most of the other… groupies? Girls? What do you even call them?

As the word “fans” continues to escape your intelligence, you try to figure out what to do. 

Terezi’s got her hand on The Human’s shoulder, shaking him as he laughs, pushing his shades away from his face so he can rub one of his eyes. You can hear snatches of their conversation, both of them in rickety folding chairs and pushing around papers on the tabletop. The Human is saying something about beats? And needing some deeper sounds to balance out her drum work. She nods and you hear her agree. 

Now, you’re aware that The Human isn’t a ‘real fan’, and you should be spending time with the troll instead, who’s probably figured by now that the Bassist is just on drugs, not entirely insane, and seems to be flirting with both Sollux and Nepeta at the same time, in some way, and it does in fact occur to you that sound manipulation and guitar is a weird taste combination.

That’s a long sentence. 

But she’s… occupied. That’s the point.

And when you glance back at your drummer, she’s laughing again, silent with her cackles, and making wise cracks about bad blindness jokes.

You know you should avoid another encounter that could make you look like shit. And that guy got a rise out of you that was particularly rare in form. Shades Human Douchelord is pointing at merch photos and making faces now. Terezi laughs more than you could ever make her laugh, at that. 

Sparks of jealousy fly from your nose, probably, and you find your fingers curling into grease-paint-stained fists. Flashes of memories of Terezi, nonplussed at your antics as she coiled into your bedsheet and suffered the pains of withdrawal. Terezi, jaded at the world and bruised and broken after ditching Gamzee once and for all. Terezi, who you painstakingly nurtured back to health and happiness that was able to make her smile even a little. 

Terezi, who dumped you because neither of you could do it anymore, and you were becoming unhealthily reliant on each other. Terezi, who left your bed, found Vriska’s, and now she’s fine. 

The Human is frozen a little, face a tiny bit flushed as she feels his features. 

“Don’t you dare lick the human,” you find yourself snarling at her as you sink into a chair next to them. “You don’t know where he’s been.”

Terezi cackles again, out loud this time. 

“Of course not, prissy-pants,” she growls right back, and bares her teeth at you before turning herself so that it’s more of an open circle and less of a dead end intersection.

“Dave here was telling me about how he thinks we should change a couple things in one of our songs,” she says, then, and you glare up at the human. Dave. So you have a name to put to the gaping maw of anal sphincter before you. “Just minor touches.”

“I did music in school,” Dave fills in, then. 

Absurdly, you’re filled with incandescent rage. 

Deep breath. 

“Whoa, don’t blow a gasket there,” Dave says, and. 

Wow, that’s not helping. 

It makes Terezi snort, though. 

Fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY SO im writing more of this. its something i havent done before, and it's probably going to be short, but i need a change-of-pace project. no promises on how mnay chapters or length of story or even completion! it goes as it goes. anyways, love yall, hope you have a good week!! <3


	3. Chapter 3

Admittedly, the set is pretty great, when you can ignore the constant buzz of the fear of death in your ears. 

It’s like something off of an album of The Offspring, mixed and shuffled with IAMX and like 5 other fantastic bands that went out of style to listen to about ten years ago unless you’re an edgy kid, or, well, someone reliving when they were an edgy kid.

Speaking of Aradia. 

She’s jumping, screaming the lyrics in a way that get a finger point from the lead guitarist for half a second.

The sound is electric, fast-paced, but dark and moving like sand in a bottle of water. It’s hypnotizing to watch the apparently-front-man-of-‘Castejacket’. His head pivots around the mic, neck straining forward from his ratty, sweaty shirt and fit-as-fuck shoulders. The holes in the ends of the sleeves fit around his thumbs, and he holds the mic to cry out every long and coarse note he bestows upon the crowd. 

Through all of it, he steals glances in your direction. Like every time he looks toward you, he expects to see you gone. And every one of the eleven looks he pins you with, he tears his eyes away with a scowl and an extra snarl into the microphone. 

It’s venomous, it’s addictive, it fuels you in a way that you definitely should not pursue with a troll for fear of losing more than just your dignity. Black, black as fuck and bleeding into you like the melodramatic heartstrings of the pulsating lyrics. A few trolls near you, you can hear making these echoing calls shamelessly back at him as a sub-level bass note follows along the belly of his voice. 

In a leap more uncharacteristic than Freud at a Pedophiles Anonymous meeting, you’re joining into the thrill and fervor. Leaping up and down with the warm and cool gray skin surrounding you, sweating through the pits of your shirt, getting mud splashed up on your ankles. At some point, you tuck your camera under your shirt for protection. Maybe that’s when it starts sprinkling? 

Who even _knows_.

You’ve never been to a show like this before. Nothing feels like it matters. None of the trolls are committing murder, none of them are even fighting, but the quick and heady punch of every snare-bass-guitar-pulse combo makes you feel almost belligerently drunk.

As the set is coming to a close, and the mass of monochrome and yellow around you is screaming for an encore, Aradia stands herself in front of you. She fortunately spares you any commentary about how you’re actually enjoying yourself at the festival. 

“We get to meet these guys backstage!” she shouts, excitedly, cupping her hand around your ear to be heard. 

Something drops into your stomach, and the adrenaline makes you stop cold. Oh god. 

Oh god oh god oh god. 

Why are you meeting the band why are you meeting the band why are you meeting HIM.

“You didn’t think the passes were for every band, did you?” she asks, elbowing you in the side. Fuck. There was some fine print on that thing you didn’t bother reading. Fine print meaning a very obvious one-inch banner along the underside of the cheap plastic. You take the rib pan in exchange for catching her by the back pocket of her jeans when she turns away again. Aradia’s got the backless slouched tank top thing going on, so it’s either that or her bra strap. 

The rain intensifies, and it’s blessedly cool on your sun-heated skin.

Your camera is weather-proof, so you’re not worried about it. But the. The band. You’re gonna meet them. You’re gonna have to look Pabst-guy in his dark eyes, which are how safely twenty feet away from you on a stage, where they’re just blasting along under the relative protection of a rain cover. You’re gonna have to look him straight in the eyes, from behind a sloppy curtain of soaking-wet hair, while you’re wringing water out of your shirt, and you’re gonna have to try to not piss yourself.

Aradia bats your hand away and points at the stage, because they’re obviously coming to a finale. The singer dude is hoarse, and his bassist is thrashing back and forth with the beat, wild mop of hair billowing around his curlicue horns. The secondary vocals chick is screaming valiantly into the mic during her guitar solo, and you’re honestly absolutely stoked to meet them, to listen to more of their music, and so on. 

Unfortunately for you, that means you’re going to die. 

At the hands of a famous guy you made fun of.

The set ends with a chorus of ten thousand humans and trolls crying out in ecstasy, and you don’t even have ample time to think about all of it before Aradia is gripping the front of your shirt, dragging you out from in front of the stage and around toward a smaller gate of some kind. 

There’s a blue-ish security troll who checks your lanyard badges with a barcode scanner, and then tells you to wait under the safety of their little overhang. The troll is…. Is that rain, or… sweat? 

???

Farewells are happening in the background, and angry dude is saying something to them in Alternian, in the face of a chorus of wails and hisses. The rain’s letting up a bit, and you’re each handed a towel with which to dry yourselves a bit. 

“So who were you making those motherfucking blessed ferocious anger-eyes at, bro?” you hear, from behind a partition. The chain link fences here are lined with some kind of vinyl tarp, and the flapping of the fabric is kind of breaking up the words. 

But the response comes from a familiar voice. Angry Pabst Guy. Like some obnoxious film noir or _bad_ CW supernatural TV show, your brain zooms in on the sound. You can almost visualize his lips, downturned and nightmare black. 

“It’s none of your useless bulgefondling business, Gamzee,” he hisses back, and coughs. There’s a quiet murmur of thanks to someone, and then he passes into view just at the gate. He’s nodding to a crew guy, handing him a guitar and shaking water out of his hair. 

Some of the spray hits a tall cerulean troll in the face, and she spits and scowls at him. Her horns are… weirdly mismatched. “Watch it, Vantas.” In her hand is a clipboard, and she’s very clearly looking over it as she peels away from the group. 

Huh. So you have a name, now.

“Hey sweat machine!” she shouts, and you wince. The security guy next to you just tilts his head over at her, and she frowns deeper. Her very aura is… you don’t really know how to put it, but you don’t like it. To each their own, though. She’s wearing a flannel with about twenty different things in the shirt pockets, and she looks harried and busy. A glimpse of the clipboard in her hand shows dense amounts of chicken scratch and lots of different colors of highlighter. 

“These our lucky winners?” she asks, then, surveying the both of you with a sort of thinly veiled disdain. 

“Yes,” Sweat Machine says, and the other troll nods. 

Not quite out of sight yet, you watch the band pass by. The lead guitarist is the shortest of all of them, and she’s cozying up to Vantas’ side with a mischievous look in her eyes. She’s saying something you can’t make out to him, teeth bared in a threatening smile. He doesn’t look the least perturbed, and shoves her face gently away from himself. The bassist is still there, looking stoned out of his mind but eyes glued to the tousle. The remaining members have walked a bit faster; they’re out of sight already. 

Clipboard Troll taps her pen loudly against the aforementioned plank of particle board, and thumbs something across the screen of what you can now see is a thick and weather-proofed ipad. 

“Yeah sure,” she sighs, and with one more skeptical look at the both of you, she lets you into the gate. The security dude follows, if only to stand at the other side of the gate and a small ways away. A bit less obvious. It clangs shut behind you. 

Aradia’s nearly vibrating out of her skin, and you very determinedly stare somewhere between straight ahead of you and the mud on the ground. But instead of paying attention to the entirely normal excitement of your friend, and her muttering ramble about random shit and details, Clipboard is looking at you. Her scrutiny is itchy on your skin. Eight pupils have a laser focus on your sunglasses. They’re not entirely dark or polarized; you grew out of that a long time ago. 

The sunglasses must still seem odd for a rainy day, but you mentally shrug off the internal criticism and look back in front of you. 

“Whatcha got under your shirt there?” she shoots just past your shoulder, and it almost clips the shell of your ear, it’s so sharp. 

“Camera,” you tell her, and pull the strap out a bit for her inspection. 

Clearly, it passes, because the next thing you know she’s no longer attempting to pin you into the mud with her eyelashes. “Yeah, well no pics of the talent or I break it.”

The threat doesn’t even sound a little bit kidding. 

“Noted,” you say. 

And, sooner than you expected, you’re at a little tent thing. It looks well-built, like the kind that would have a floor in it. When the flap is pulled open by some dude with split-colored hair and a bajillion horns (four), you catch the eye of someone very familiar inside, whose eyes fill with rage faster than you could have ever imagined. 

“Hey, you’re here,” horns guy says to Clipboard, and when his mouth opens, there’s a bifurcated tongue. Christ. Edgy edgelords with their catchy music and nasty fashion. Clipboard holds an arm out, as if you and Aradia were going to rush into the canvas without her permission, and motions for you to stay back.

Horns guy is holding the door open just enough for you to see inside, more, and Angry Troll Pabst Shitty Beer Man is fixated on you. Apparently you weren’t the only one who missed the memo of what your backstage pass meant. Maybe he just hadn’t considered it yet? Is he a dumbass, too, or what?

Aradia gasps audibly next to you, and when you glance her way, her eyes are as wide as dinner plates and her entire body must have flushed red. Her chained D-ring cuffs jangle against her bangles as she almost jumps. The vibration’s gotten more intense, you guess. 

You were right about the floor, you think, as the flaps close behind four-horns-dude. A glimpse of a slightly raised wooden platform with a dirty welcome mat shows itself, right as a cry of _’OH FUCK NO’_ gets muffled in the air of the tent. 

“Hey Aradia, can we go home now?” you ask, and of course, she ignores you. Her fingers clamp tight around your wrist as Clipboard walks up to the tent, and reopens it. The previously occupied chair that Vantas had been sitting in is on its side, and you can hear some vague shouting and then some shooshing from somewhere else in the tent. 

Lead guitarist girl is laughing, holding her stomach, and bassist guy is lighting a spliff, and this really fuckin’ cute girl with very pointy hips and _very_ sharp red shades and horns and fingers and everything is cackling, leaning back on a dirty-looking pile of blankets. You don’t remember seeing her. But she’s sitting half on top of what you recognize as a percussion storage case or something. We all went to high school. We all half-assed the clarinet for three years. We know.

Unwillingly you’re dragged into the tent. 

It’s bigger on the inside than it had looked from the outside, and spread with gross old doormats and empty cans of Faygo, which, _what the fuck_. 

Bassist guy nods at the two of you as you clamber up onto the platform. Lead guitarist _meows_ at you, swiping a paw, which Aradia returns, and honestly that right there should have been enough to make you just turn heel and ask to be taken out back and put out of your misery. But on a table in front of them they have messy stacks of signed merch, a huge coffee can of silver sharpies, and an ash tray. 

The yelling stops right as the tent flap closes. 

And from what appears to be another part of the tent, Vantas strolls in. 

Funny enough, you suddenly have absolutely no desire to meet the members of this band. Famous or not. Not that you’ll get a chance, strictly speaking, before you get torn apart by the now-suspiciously-calm-pabst-troll.

He’s still shorter than you, but instead of holding himself like a grumpy old man with horrendous sciatica and a wide variety of scoliosis complications, he’s standing straight. At this angle, he makes it up to your nose. A hand on his shoulder squeezes as his eyes once more fill with unadulterated fury, and he very visibly takes a deep breath. 

“I’ll be back in thirty,” Clipboard Troll says, and Vantas gives her the finger. 

“Later Vriska!” Cat Furry Troll says to her, leaning out from her chair and waving. 

Sharp Girl Troll kisses the back of Vriska’s hand before she leaves the tent. Vriska [insert last name here] blushes, and stalks away, followed by a victoriously devilish grin. 

Once she’s gone, though, you have no _clue_ what to do with yourself. 

Thankfully Horns, of all trolls, pushes past Vantas to hold his claws out to Aradia. She nearly faints on the spot, you can see, and you don’t get the appeal of him honestly but maybe it’s a troll thing. Taking his hand and shaking it vigorously, she nods as he recites his name. 

“Sollux Captor,” he says, and you definitely will absolutely never comment on the lisp. “Welcome to the R&R tent of Castejacket. You wanna water or…?” 

“Anything from you,” Aradia just barely whispers, and Sollux just laughs like a goddamn goblin while she loses her absolute shit in embarrassment. 

“Water sounds great, yeah,” you reply to him, despite him absolutely not talking to you, and he looks up at you with some kind of dawning smirk on his thin mouth. “She’s Aradia. I’m Dave.” 

As he turns away from you and toward the mini-fridge, he shoves Vantas out of the way and says something softly to him. 

“Oh yeah, I see what you meant,” is what you think you hear. It’s this exchange that gives you the absolutely excellent opportunity to meet Vantas’s eyes one more fateful time. They’re narrowed, and the bags under them are a lot more prominent in the artificial lighting of the tent. Not makeup, then. It looks really cool.

It’s quiet as you receive the water, and quiet as you’re directed to two extra chairs that someone pulls out of nowhere, and quiet while you crack open your bottle to the sound of Vantas’s steaming brain that’s whistling very joyfully from his ears. But he finally sits back down, intentionally directing his body more toward Aradia than you. That’s probably fair. It’s a good thing the social interaction is going away from you; you were getting pretty close to having a classic Dave meltdown, where all the social pressure makes you into a complete and total dick. Usually to the sound of overjoyed giggles from John.

You did drag him at the PBR booth, after all. 

If you’re lucky, he won’t embarrass you in front of this tent full of famous people

“So I know at least this pathetic waste of a buffoon has no idea who we are,” he rasps, and. 

Whelp. Cat’s out of that bag. 

Bassist laughs out a cloud of smoke, and god, that shit is dank. Sharp Girl and Cat girl look, intrigued, in your direction, and Sollux laughs. 

“So, let me introduce us all to each other,” Vantas says, and his eyes burn into yours again. Locked together, you’re chained to this fuckin comet until he decides to unlatch his twenty claws from your miserable hide. No choice, huh?

Pointing to everyone in turn, first Sollux, then Bassist, Cat Furry, Sharp Troll, and then finally himself, he rattles off names in order. 

“Sollux Captor, sound. Gamzee, bassist. Nepeta, Lead Guitar and background vocals. Terezi, drums and bullshit. And me. Karkat. You should know who I am in the band by now,” he says, taking a couple of measured breaths. So he’s trying so hard to stay calm. 

Why does that make you want to rile him up? 

Probably shouldn’t do that, though. 

“Sorry, my three brain cells are working so _hard_ today,” you say, and well. Guess we’re doing this anyway. “Could you explain anyway? You did so good with the other four.” 

The tent is absolutely silent. Aradia is staring at you in shock, and something breaks with a resounding crack before Nepeta and Terezi start snorting through their hands, which turns into laughing, which turns into full on guffaws and stomach-holding hilarity. Sollux looks like you’ve just handed your spleen to him on a platter for his own gross and gleeful experimentation. 

Vantas is holding the broken remains of the arm of his chair in his hand. 

But he takes a deep breath. 

“Karkat Vantas, graduated from Julliard, play second guitar and do lead vocals, you sad excuse for a pathetic little shit.” 

Oh, and it feels so good to antagonize him. 

Oh, so, good. 

And when it gets flung back at you? It’s better than sushi.

“I liked your little sweet message for me,” you tell him, attempting to keep a straight face.

He looks at you for a fiery second, and then he just completely and totally ignores you. 

“So, Aradia, was it?” he asks, and his face takes on a little bit more of a genial expression. He’s not smiling, but the openness seems genuine enough you bet he actually likes talking to fans. “Did you have any questions for us to start off the conversation?”

Aradia lights up in a way you’ve only ever seen from her when she manages to uncover a particularly tricksy fact that connects something for her in an incredible way. Or when she saw that skull the dude had encrusted entirely in gems for shits and giggles. That really got her going. She didn’t shut up about it for weeks. 

“Can I ask anything?!” she exclaims, and. Wow. 

Okay, so she really likes this band. And maybe taunting the very taunt-able guy in the black shirt is a little dickish of you when she spent a lot of time trying to win these passes. So you’ll keep your mouth shut and pay attention. 

“Yeah, sure, kid,” The Sharp Girl says, and you can’t remember if her name was Terezi or Nepeta. At least you’ve got the names themselves down, though. Sometimes troll names are incomprehensible. 

Gamzee blows a cloud of smoke to the vent in the roof of the tent, and you manage just barely not to wince at the smoke. Figures, though. At least he’s not just dropping acid or doing lines of coke in front of you. You’ve heard of that happening. Does that actually happen? You’re never really sure if famous people actually do a ton of drugs, or if it’s just more of the Hollywood bullshit. 

Aradia’s asking a question, and talking amiably with the band. Your eyes are glued to the merch on the table, and you cast a glance around before picking up a poster that’s only got four out of five signatures on it. Tugging it out from under a tee that still smells like a cardboard box, you examine it.

There are the given tour dates and locations, and a kind of badly rendered logo on the front. You could do better than this. Two years of printmaking courses before switching to photography taught you that. Jade’s better at making stuff in illustrator, though, so maybe you could email one of them her contact info and get her a gig.

Strangely to you, though, Karkat isn’t front man in any of the pictures. He’s got the most magnetism of all of them, so much passion, but he’s never standing in the center. Everyone has equal footing, and he’s usually placed in the back. In one of the posters he’s pulling on the hair of and yelling in the ear of the bassist, who he’s got to bring down to his level to scold. The girls are staring at them with disdain, and Sollux is in the background trying to pull them apart. The subject matter is a bit silly, and it’s taken with a candid flair. So that’s gonna be a rare one. 

Another poster, they’re standing on some railroad tracks, another they’re sitting on the edge of a high-rise, and another they’re in the classic five-man band pose, all giving their mug to the camera. 

This is just a personal judgement, but…

If they were selling on merch alone, they would have had to abandon the band a long time ago.

It’s been longer than you thought when a voice speaks up kind of close to your ear. 

“You don’t seem too interested in us,” it says, and you startle. The next time it speaks, you’re looking toward it, and Terezi (right? That’s the pointy one, right?) is sitting with arms crossed and cocking her head at you. “Why are you here?” 

You sigh. It was a hope that no one would ask, but there’s no harm in telling the truth. 

“Aradia’s sister was sick, so she invited me cause I was free.”

It’s simple enough, and you put down the stuff on the table. You very bravely resist the urge to neaten the piles and stacks. 

“Oh!” She claps her hands together with glee. An unexpected reaction, but okay. 

“So what did you think?” she asks, then, and ah. Yeah, they must not get any new first-time opinions from amateurs. Much less humans, most likely. Terezi is leaning forward, shark-like teeth ready to gobble up your insults or praise. 

“Y’all have a good sound,” you say. Maybe if you keep it short, you’ll get out of scrutiny? Though to be honest, you walked into the tent, so. 

“Yeah? Elaborate.”

Okay, so no chance of shortness. Fuck. When you look to Aradia for help, she’s engrossed in a discussion of the different vibes of their albums and which she likes the most. They seem to be interested. Everyone but Terezi, that is. So no luck with phoning a friend, either. 

“Well, you guys start off strong, and end strong,” you start, and you hear the conversation to your left peter off a bit, but you’re gonna go ahead and ignore that shit. “But it’s not like it’s the same sound throughout. It’s like trying to catch a moving train while riding a horse, but the train is like some mad max shit. The reverbs on the bass drum is cool, and y’all are magnetic as fuck. I dunno if it’s your vocals or what, but it’s an awesome experience. Whole time was a good time. Like makes you feel like punching the president in his fat ugly face, but also exerts the pain of being an angry middle schooler with no outlets and no friends and probably way too much Clearasil in their face. It’s good shit. Epic harmonies, uplifting enough to be Dragonforce, ten out of ten would buy tickets to another show.” 

By the end of your little ramble, you’re staring at your hands to try to maintain your train of thought. The rain water is drying on your hair now, and you know it’s sticking up everywhere. So much for the relaxer treatment you got a couple days ago from Rose’s mom.

The tent doesn’t go quiet or anything dramatic like that, but you can feel more than one set of eyes on you. Terezi’s satisfied and entertained grin is what you get to look at first, with Aradia still chattering ceaselessly like a broken faucet. Mainly toward Sollux. Gamzee’s just an observer at this point, and very obviously deep in his high. 

The other set of eyes, though…

You look up, and Nepeta’s moved over to where Sollux and Gamzee are, leaning back on Gamzee’s knees and smiling at Aradia’s unbridled excitement. That leaves – 

Karkat’s face betrays a little of his surprise as he stares at you. It shutters as soon as he realizes you’re looking at him, and melts back into a scowl beneath mussed and crazy hair, but for a second you think you saw a little gleam of something in there. The raised eyebrows, the relaxed mouth, something. 

He’s not entirely unattractive, is he? 

Terezi claps her hands together, and she’s looking more over your shoulder than at your face. 

“I’m blind,” she offers, taking your lapse in speech as curiosity. It wasn’t, so much, but whatever. “So this music stuff is pretty much the only thing I can do anymore.”

Oh shit. 

“Oh shit,” you say, and she laughs. 

“Thanks, dork,” she replies. You huff, and feel yourself getting embarrassed finally. A cool hand pushes your shoulder, lingering on your trapezius, clearly feeling it. You cast all suspicions toward the fact that she’s blind and might have been using you as a prop. Or something. 

The hand flies up to your face before you can stop it, and she’s drawing her palm across your face. 

“What, seeing impaired actually do this?” you end up asking out loud, and straight up, she leans back with the force of her laughter. The tent narrows to her, essentially, as your embarrassment grows. It flip flops easily between that and the notion that she got you in a pretty funny situation. 

A growl echoes across the tent, and all the trolls go silent. When you look for the source, Karkat’s chin is pointed in your direction, and Terezi makes a noise in her throat. 

“Okay, just text me or something, you seem like you know things about music, Dave,” Terezi says, grabbing your phone from your hands. She deftly opens and navigates to the contact adding place, to your immense surprise. 

“I’m not gonna hook up with you,” you tell her. And that much is true. She waves you off with a snort. 

“I have a matesprit, but I need… friends,” she says, and you don’t really believe that, but it doesn’t hurt to have famous friends? Maybe she has pals who can get you freelance work. “This is our home city.”

Oh, weird. You didn’t know that. 

“Yeah okay,” you say, and when she hands the phone back, you send her a text. She replies with an alligator emoji. 

“We should jam on some beats,” she adds. 

You tell her about your blind nephew, Hal, and how it’s an injury but you’re still used to the stuff. 

She tells you about the tour, and a couple crazy stories from the road.

In what feels like seconds, Aradia gets handed her complimentary free merch, Sollux writes his personal number on the back of a card and sticks it in her front jeans pocket, and Karkat is leaning out and calling for Vriska. They have to get to the hotel so Gamzee doesn’t attract the cops or start an orgy. His words, not yours. 

Aradia is pulling on your arm again, and you have to admit you had a fun time. 

Karkat doesn’t shake your hand as you leave, but he’s glaring again. The look you see in his eyes is angry, but…

Sad. 

As if by instinct, you lift a hand to reach out to him. He eyes it, you eye it, there are a lot of eyes on your hand. Thankfully, you rein in your empathy impulse, and turn away. 

“That was weird, man,” is the last thing you hear before Vriska is leading you back to the main festival grounds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey! had an urge to write so im posting this! depression is kinking my ass, folks, hopefully I'll be back to normal soon. love yall! hope everyone has a beautiful christmas. <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys, thank you so much for all of your support <3 i love you all a lot
> 
> enjoy this kinda short chapter!

So. 

The trip home is really something. It’s a moment of quiet contemplation for you, and a constant chatter-fest of awe from your left. Aradia is a shockingly good driver, for the amount of time she spends not looking at the road. You long learned to accept it and not question, and she doesn’t complain about your complaining. 

“He gave me his number!!” she’s saying, practically exclaiming. As soon as you got into the car, it’s essentially the only thing she can talk about. “I mean it’s probably a burner phone, or something he does for all the fans, or maybe he just wants to get into my concupiscient pants, but—“ 

Aradia does this, like. “Squee” sound? Which sounds incredibly stupid outside of Japanese comics. But eh. Shrug.

In your little bubble of silence, your mouth stays closed. Visions of Terezi cross your mind, slithering between the astounding memories of the show, and weed smell, and Karkat’s eyes. 

You’re looking at a picture of Karkat right now, actually. One of the many good pics today. There’s one of him snarling at you, one of him shouting, one of the whole band in that split second before you got lost in the crowd that you don’t really remember taking, and… that one. There’s this one picture, the little million pixels with stark color and contrast and man, you won’t even have to edit that one outside of cropping. 

That’s a special one. 

You favorite it (a function Rox programmed into your camera for you) before clicking the power. 

Aradia is still gushing, and it fades into the background. Outside the car, along the wide swatch of horizon, everything is pink and blue. The sunset is beautiful, and you’re tempted to take what would probably be the thousandth photo of a sunset you have saved onto your external hard drive at home.

You’re spacing for long enough that the next thing you notice, Aradia is steering around the familiar potholes of her neighborhood. Past the fried chicken place that has a different name every few months, past Mr. Kim’s donuts, around the small park, and she’s pulling into the complex she lives in with her sister. 

“You wanna come inside for a minute?” Aradia asks, and you can see Damara and Porrim sitting out on their porch, passing a bowl between them. They’re probably going to be having noisy baked sex later, so you’d rather not. “D said she would order Chinese for us if you wanted.”

“Nah, I’m good,” you say, and she makes a noise like ‘suit yourself’ before throwing her ancient rusty jeep into park. 

“I’ll text you later when I figure out if I got the real digits or not!” she says, as you get out of the car. “It’s been like two hours, one of those driving, so maybe he’ll be free!” 

She’s more excited and earnest about this than you’ve seen in a long time. It makes you grin. There was some tough shit for a while there, with the pregnancy failing and her being ditched like last month’s news. Something close to a genuine smile threatens at your lips, and she shoves your shoulder toward the fence separating your apartment complexes. 

“I’m gonna crash, dude,” you say, and she rolls her eyes. 

“Of course you are,” she replies, and turns toward her place after making sure the car is locked. “Don’t forget to crash into the bed at least.” 

\----------

The stairs to your place conquered, you almost fall through the door. You lock it first, deadbolt, and ditch your shoes. 

You wrench all three deadbolts into place, despite the fact that your apartment complex is nicer than `Radia’s. It’s still in a bad neighborhood sorta. You can paint a junker gold, and it’s still stuck in the redneck’s lawn, ya feel?

A smallish black cat winds around your ankles, and her little bell rings, and you bend to pick her up. She purrs into your hair, sniffing at the places sweat likes to connect around your collar before making biscuits in your shoulder. 

“Hey, Cans,” you murmur, letting yourself enjoy the softness of her fur for about a full forty-five seconds before you have to put her down and head into the shower. 

The Mayor of Can Town (full name) is waiting by her food bowl, chirping, when you wander back into the kitchen. The plant on the windowsill is dead (again). The room is dark except for the lamplight from your desk, and everything is quiet except for her and the food you pour out for her. 

It’s heaven after a day like today. 

A bit of energy does a pirouette into your brain, the air conditioning flips on, and you turn on the small stereo in the corner. It immediately tunes to the classical station. The need for wordless instrumentals is something you hid for a long time, and once everyone found out, they never pried or mentioned it to you. All your friends are little shits, as well as your four awful siblings, but they let you have this one creature comfort to decompress at the end of the day.

The absolutely massive fluffy towel you have wrapped around your shoulders is warm. Once you have some leftover chicken in your right hand, and your left is busy dragging and dropping pictures from your camera and into the “to be examined” folder on your desktop, you relax. 

Cans jumps up onto your lap, and settles herself across your crossed legs. The chicken hand goes to pet her once you wipe it clean on your old pajama shirt.

“Did you miss dad while he was out?” you ask Cans. 

Cans does not respond. 

“I knew you missed me,” you tell her. 

Cans purrs a little harder for a second, but otherwise does not deem you worthy of response. You can dig it. 

In dragging the new pictures over to your computer, you make sure to set up a backup to run in an hour, and you see the ones you took of Karkat. 

That One Picture stands there, a little striking, and you get curious. 

\----------

Two hours later, you’re fighting back yawns and ignoring the fact that you should sleep because you have a wedding to photo tomorrow. Weddings are easy, though, you tell yourself. It’ll be fine. 

There are about sixty tabs open in Chrome. 

Several of them are articles about Castejacket. Another bunch of them are videos that you keep switching between, listening to a few songs at a time and absorbing their stuff. It’s not as infectious as if they were standing in front of you, but your toe taps enough that Cans trots off to her tree instead. 

One song you like a lot, one you can’t understand with the garbled clicking and mauled Alternian dialect (it’s not in English by the way) (yknow in case you hadn’t noticed). It’s not like the others, less laced-with-PCP and more deliberate and dark. It’s a bit haunting, more than a bit delicious, and easy to listen to time and again. They could be singing about potato salad for all you know. Karkat sitting there on a stool and howling mournfully about mayonnaise. Sollux ramping up the bass to a gliss that follows a poem about pickle relish. Nepeta screaming about knives and parsley chopping. 

That last one actually isn’t quite unlikely. 

The rest are group photos, or individual photos, and their twitters. They’re trolls, so their handles are pretty obnoxious, but you find all of them through a very nice fansite. The photos on the aforementioned site are boring for the most part. Some are out of focus and a lot of them aren’t framed badly, but they’re not framed well either. 

Think like, the Bad Suns. 

All in a straight line, all blank and expressionless trying to look badass. 

Acceptable… maybe???? 

Ugh. 

Back to twitter. You’re able to find most of them by just the first name, and confirm with the fansite. 

Sifting through all the alternian calligraphy takes time. You’re so tired you almost forget that google has a translation option. The results are kinda full of grammatical holes, but you’re not some kinda nerd, so you don’t care a whole lot. 

Nepeta’s twitter is mostly cool and cute cats, her lusus, and her and the sweaty guy which you now know is her moirail. Or uh. ‘meow-rail’ as she puts it. She’s wearing a hat you hadn’t seen at the show, this one blue with long flaps on the sides.

Terezi’s stuff is actually a bunch of skateboard tricks and you’re honestly really confused as to how a blind chick can skateboard, before you realize it’s her sister. Didn’t know she had a sister. She’s retweeted her a lot. A bunch of teal and rad sunglasses (trolls have such weird taste in eyewear, huh) and thick maroon Doc Martens with tongues flipped out.

A couple really old videos she posted up as a #TBT look a bit different than the rest. There’s a clear timestamp from like a decade ago, and the girl in the other vids is there. But she’s skating next to what looks like a younger, shorter version of herself. 

That story looks… interesting. 

Maybe something to ask her about later?

It’s none of your business for now. 

There are some tabloids speculating on her like, reason for blindness. But none of them actually know why. Just that it happened a few years before she joined the band. 

Again, none of your business. 

Gamzee’s twitter is pretty vacant except for a few cult shit posts, and Sollux doesn’t seem to have an account, which is interesting. 

Maybe one of your more tech-oriented relatives can help out. Dirk or Hal would love the job.

Then, sliding into the finish line like a cross-country-slalom asshole spraying snow, is the piece de resistance. Or how _ever_ the fuck you wanna spell that. 

Karkat. Oh God, this account is full of gold. There’s a reason that you’re still awake, and it’s because you can’t stop reading the increasingly angry and creative insults about the various stupid people that he’s encountered. There’s of course a bunch of band shit, and some stuff promoting politically progressive movements, which you admit you hadn’t expected. But so much of it is just blind rage. And it’s amazing. 

Exactly what you would expect, but a million times better. 

Holy shit, it’s so good. 

It’s so good, you can’t resist baiting him. 

Deliriously tired, and shaking with laughter, you make a mistake.

You post a tweet of your own, to all your many followers.

It’s that photo you were so enraptured by, before. It’s a really fuckin good one. 

And a caption. 

_You didn’t like me very much, so I didn’t get a chance to say something.  
Why is all your merch so ugly? Get a professional photographer. @CarcinoGeneticist_

Christ, it’s not even clever. So very off brand.

But before you can take it back, you press the little button that posts the tweet. 

And, very fucking proud of your own immense intelligence, you close your laptop with a smack. 

Time for bed.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! enjoy the chapter :)
> 
> a note edit: I got permission from them, and wanted to say that my karkat is based appearance- and body-type- wise off the karkat drawn by thedoublepp on tumblr!

So, _worms_ , it’s been maybe a total of seven days. If you were some lesser guy, maybe with the douchiest penchant for sunglasses since Human John Lennon, you’d count out that it’s been some kinda days, broken into hours, minutes, seconds, and so on. 

Luckily, you don’t really give a shit. 

Especially since you’re currently fielding calls from probably your (platonically) least favorite person on Terra. 

In the past two days out of seven, she’s taken to calling almost every hour on the hour. She’s gotten everyone in the group to bother you, even going to far as to drive Gamzee to your fucking _door_ to ask if you could please ‘for the love of troll jesus call her back already.’

There are a few very good reasons you’ve already highlighted for her in text form, which you would use as examples for why you’re not doing just that. 

1) Vriska is annoying and has your worst interests at heart  
2) Vriska has an annoying voice  
3) Vriska will stop at nothing to be annoying  
4) Some guy with douche shades and bad taste in photography made you his personal enemy on twitter  
5) Vriska tried to kill half your friends when you were kids and one time almost fed you to her mom, and also led one of your friends off a literal cliff into the abuse cycle of being in a relationship with herself.  
Now, since number 4 is the only one that we can really change, and the author is choosing to change the perceived history of certain grubhood events of some certain trolls, we’ll focus on number 4. 

Number 4. Man, number fucking four. 

So that human you hate so much, the one that just _begs_ to be hated, took some amateur pics of you when you weren’t really paying attention due to the fact that you were so classically angry. He posted one of them up on twitter, of course, right after you finished being an asshole to him in front of way too many witnesses. 

And he said you have bad shit!

You should sue him! 

Vriska’s number pops up on your phone screen, interrupting your very invested game of hole.io and sending you spiraling down to fifth place, so you answer. 

The soft cushions of your human bed (not a concupiscient platform, you’re not some kinda troll fresh off the boat) muffle your voice as you turn over, growling into the receiver. 

“The fuck, Vriska.”

“This is the fifth message today alone and—oh!” She sounds cruelly delighted. Curse her. Curse her innate ability for being a hardass and managing a bunch of raggedy misfits. “Well, this isn’t your voicemail, for once.” 

“Your acuity for observation never ceases to amaze me,” you sigh, and she laughs. 

“Just sue him already,” you add, and she laughs again. It makes your skin prickle with distaste. 

“No, I’m not going to prosecute him,” she says, and she’s using that tone that means she thinks she’s got the best plan ever. You know the one. It usually accompanies cis human men in a simultaneous tshirt and blazer. 

Not willing to play into her obvious want for you to ask what she’s going to even _do_ , you roll out of bed and hit the button for speakerphone. The self-cooling layer of sopor quilting underneath your top blanket kinda squelches under your ass as you stand up. 

A quiet squelch. 

Probably. 

The plush rug is a little nice, and you make a face and cringe away from the cold wood paneling of the floor. 

“What do you want,” you deadpan, shrugging on a long cardigan when she remains silent. 

Vriska’s end of the conversation is deafeningly quiet. You roll your eyes and double check to make sure you actually hit the speaker button, before picking up the device and heading for your kitchen. 

As you enter, you wake up your laptop, which is still sitting on the counter from last night’s dinner. One of your older songs starts to play. The more acoustic vibe is something you were thinking of incorporating more of, though the feel would be a little different from usual. The new trappy feel of songs wasn’t totally your flavor, but maybe you could still release that alongside a solo album. 

Maybe some stuff that humans like to call ‘LGBT’, which isn’t really a thing for trolls, but the younger humans who like your work tend to lean in that direction. They love that Sufjan Stevens bastard. And that olive blood Hozier, who is capitalizing on it to deafening levels. He’s a cool guy, though.

“Now, I applaud your managing to stop haranguing Dave Strider after just nine tweets,” Vriska says, and you repress the urge to hiss at his name. “Nine very colorful and scathing tweets.”

“Yeah?” you ask, pressing a button on your very old and very dirty coffee pot. 

“But your fans are getting a little bit vicious on him.” 

That part makes you raise your eyebrows, but you can’t really say you’re surprised. Serves him right for being an idiot. 

“And?” you ask, pulling the sugar across the counter. 

“ _Aaaaand,_ ” she nearly sings, and you get a gross feeling about what she’s calling you for. “That totally cancels out our ability to sue him for breach of VIP pass contract, because he can just sue you right back.”

Shit. 

So this was why she was trying to reach you. 

“Sollux stopped you just short of ten tweets, but you still got the chance to be ugly about it in public,” she says. Your head is already in your hands, and you’re groaning loudly. Fuck.

The worst person ever is holding you responsible for the lack in legal action. Which you are, to be fair. But that weird smiley tone in her voice is just chock full of platonic resentment. And you’re fucked. 

“Now, the real trick is to figure out how to close up this whole mess, and roll it back out in our favor.” 

Still groaning loudly and mentally hitting yourself stupid, you fall into a kitchen stool. She cackles, and you resign your fate, and your old song plays as a terrific overlay for the entire situation. The song is so transparently about Terezi, even if she never admitted she recognized it. Red nail polish scarring back, mentions of cheating and betrayal and the dire hope of dismal dreams and feelings for the both of you together. 

It’s tomato juice on the wound of already having to talk to her new and awful girlfriend.

“No,” you beg your all-powerful manager. “God no.” 

The whole situation all wrapped up together is like the final curtain call for your sanity. 

“Yes,” she replies, simpers, and your dignity takes that last bow. “I want to offer him a job.” 

\----------

Now, to say that your scream of (dignified) rage had made a few birds fly off would be an overstatement, given how nice your place is and how thick the walls are. A small apartment for what you’re paying, but it has a bunch of big windows and good internal construction, and the property managers are super nice. They’re a couple of casual Texas millionaires and don’t blink an eye at what you do for a living. 

A car is waiting for you outside as you trundle down the steps. You’re still folding back a shirtsleeve. 

Kanaya wasn’t there to give you any advice, but you think you did alright picking out an outfit for meeting a probable black crush. You definitely decided to think about it as not being a crush, but dug around for the onyx-encrusted Rolex anyway. 

You’ve got on an older black jean vest with all the spikes, your combat boots, a pressed cotton button-down rolled up to the elbows, as many rings as you own, and what your brother would lovingly refer to as ‘a disgusting and excessive quantity of ear jewelry’. Every piece of this is calculated to incite both jealousy and disgust in your definitely-not-a-black-crush. 

You’re well aware that the whole outfit just oozes pretentious rock star attire, and you know from hate-scrolling Dave’s twitter that he both loves and abhors the generous nature of pointless excessiveness. You believe at one point you remember him calling Mick Jagger a ‘walking cryptozoological disaster’. There were some things about outgrowing doing it himself, and receiving huge amounts of secondhand embarrassment from seeing others emulate the style.

It’s perfect.

The motorcycle seems a bit over the top, however, so you just take the car waiting for you. 

Before you’d finished your coffee back in your kitchen, Vriska was sending you his address, the rules to getting him to come on and what you could offer him, and so on. You’re well prepared. You won’t grovel; you draw the line at any sort of groveling, but you’ve been instructed to be ‘nice’ to avoid the incoming PR disaster. Nice never really was your style.

The driver pulls up to a small apartment complex, something that looks like it was painted over to look a little newer than the dumps surrounding it. Not-so-fondly you remember growing up in a place like this. Gunshots in the middle of the night, bus to private school in the morning, no friends cause you didn’t even feel at home amongst the rusts. 

The rusts, you only mention because they at least didn’t give you nasty looks when you sat with them at the sterile lunch tables of the somewhat underfunded charter your dad paid out the ass for. 

Your most diehard ‘fans’ and some scattered paparazzi are crowded around the gate of the place. Must have been threatened by management with police on the line, since they’re not actively going through the fence or anything. One of them spots you. Sighing, you stare forward as people clamor around your car, and stay dutifully outside the fence as it closes. 

A few of the residents of the complex sit out on a balcony, smoking and talking amongst themselves. They all have kinda darker skin like Strider. Somewhere you remember this being a human thing, like your own blood castes. 

It makes you sound incredibly ignorant when you talk about it in conversation with fans and press conferences, but with your own caste activism, you’re not really woke about the race issues of humanity. Terra is still obscenely divided despite the efforts made in the last fifty years. 

The people behind you erupt with noise as you climb out of the car, handing the driver some tip to stay put. Christ, they’re loud. One of the guys watching you from the balcony shouts something in a language you don’t understand. 

Clomping up the stairs is annoying, since Dave will have heard you coming, and they creak and moan in a way that’s very telling of their age. A few kids scramble by on the sidewalk beneath, staring at you before laughing at something you don’t hear. They screech a bit and run away again.

Fuckin’ annoying. 

There’s a troll kid with them, with two horns protruding out from their forehead. Blood color undiscernible, by the myriad of tones they wear and their gray eyes. It hits somewhere familiar as they disappears with their friends.

When you were a grub, you pretty much kept to yourself. Back then, the living situation was still really separated. Trolls were still lower than low, for the most part, and a lot of them relegated to slums. There were only a couple of old apartment complexes opening their doors. As a result, you stayed in your own small community, sticking to your dad’s church, and your lusus, and your online friends. You remained unseen, but not blind to the plight of lowbloods around you. Never even thought to make human friends. 

This is all without mentioning the rare blood color that prompted ostracizing faster than fucking a sheep.

“Strider, open up!” you call out, rapping the door with your knuckles. 

The door flies open, and a man possessed looks back out at you. 

It’s only open about ten inches, but through it you can see the familiarly slight figure of the guy who pissed you off so much just a week ago. 

He frowns when he sees you. 

You also frown when you see him.

“Where’s the spider?” he asks, and it sounds like code in the tone he uses. Tired, and gravelly, like he hasn’t spoken to anyone. The puffiness and bags around his eyes make him look like he’s been crying. Your chest pangs with pity, and it makes you almost angry with the shock of it. 

“The fuck is wrong with you?” you ask. “Just let me in, and I’ll explain.” 

He opens the door long enough for you to stomp inside and survey his living space. All of the eighty thousand deadbolts get locked before he turns to face you, hunched over and brow pinched. 

“Your fucking _people_ \--“ he starts, and you wave a hand and cut him off. 

“I don’t have time and I’ve been prohibited from being properly pissed at you,” you tell him. You have lots of time, that was a lie. Time left in the day, anyway. Time until your fuse runs out? Not so much. 

“Call off the fucking hive!” Dave exclaims. He…

He’s completely different from the last time you saw him. It’s eerie. Like he’s an entirely different person, and you scowl as the contrast sinks in. 

“The clowns, get them to go away. The police can’t catch them,” he snarls, scratching at his head with both hands. “Get them to leave me alone at night and I’ll do whatever the fuck you want.” 

Shit. 

Clowns. 

You hadn’t even thought of the clowns, and you’re suddenly pissed at something else altogether. A pitch flirt is useless without a capable fucking partner. Humans don’t have moirails, so he doesn’t have anyone sitting here making sure he’s okay. Humans for the most part take care of themselves, except for friends. What about the rust girl? But no, they weren’t pale, were they. 

Before you can feel any more pity, you whip out your phone and open a text to Gamzee. 

_Call off the cult,_ is what you write. 

They must have come to harass him, since he insulted the incumbent’s band. 

Strider is walking back to the door as he paces the hallway. A minute passes, and then like night and day, his face almost melts. 

“They gone?” he asks, and you can tell without checking anything that they are. Dave is sinking into a chair, fingers rubbing circles at his temples, but his posture is so much more relaxed than before. 

“I really don’t want to apologize,” you say, crossing your arms and examining him from where you stand at his entryway. His mouth opens to tell you off, or call you out on the completely unnecessary antagonization, but you interrupt. “But I’m sorry about them. They haven’t done that since the cease and desist in year one of the band.” 

“So many fucking nightmares, man,” Strider says, and good fucking god, that’s what they were doing? Should talk to Gamzee about what he can do to punish them for that ‘incredibly uncool motherfuckin’ violation’. “I couldn’t even sleep for the past three days. When I managed to close my eyes, they were there.”

You hiss, and grit your teeth. 

Strider is gonna crash soon, so you might as well lay it all out on the table. 

“Vriska isn’t here because she felt like, as the one who fucked with you,” you start, and to his credit, Dave doesn’t make the joke a lesser person would have. “I should be the one to offer you the job.” 

And again, to his credit, Dave doesn’t say anything. His eyes widen, and his eyebrows raise, and he keeps his mouth flat shut. 

“J…” he stammers, and then goes silent again. You wave your fingers at him in a circle, prompting.

“Come on, ask it,” you 

“You guys are offering me a job?” he asks, somewhat managing to cover his surprise with a tone so flat it could be roadkill. 

Back to hating him. Good. 

You nearly hiss the following words. 

“Yes, Vriska liked the picture you took of me, and wants to use it as official merch,” you seethe, and lean yourself against the jamb of his kitchen door, staring. “She looked through the rest of your shitty archive, as well as your amateur little website.” 

_Strider’s eyes narrow. For someone coming off of a wave of chucklevoodoos, he musters up the strength to walk up to you kinda quick._

_“You’re being such a fucking d—“_

_“Douche?” you ask, growling at his proximity. God, he’s so tall. You hate it, platonically._

_…And not platonically._

_“It’s a choice,” you sneer at him, and press two fingers against the upper right section of his chest. As you draw back from getting him just outside your personal bubble, you dig in your claws a little. Kanaya would absolutely lose her mind from secondhand embarrassment. The little Sollux that lives in your head is nearly screaming at you, but you know you’re just that fucking clever._

_Especially when Strider doesn’t back away more than he needs to, and his eyes widen a little more. This time, the realization is an entirely different sort. You mentally clap yourself on the back._

The pitch fantasy is totally going amazingly.

Real Dave, however, doesn’t even square up. 

In reality, outside of a dream that you definitely haven’t had in the past week, Strider just folds an arm onto his kitchen table, and lays his forehead on it. He’s really tired, huh. Almost makes you feel a little mean.

“This is just your schtick, I imagine,” he sighs wearily, and you kiss your entirely inappropriate pitch flirting goodbye. 

“Sorry,” is what comes out of your mouth, and before he can raise an eyebrow, you follow it. “I’m not used to being around humans. You all are so fragile.”

So he ends up rolling his eyes instead. 

You don’t really know what you’re feeling anymore. Red and black and palest pink are warring in your mind. 

A meowbeast sticks its head around the corner of the end of the hallway, and you catch a glimpse of a cut-off ear tip before it’s gone again. 

“Yeah, I can… I don’t know,” Dave says. You stare him down, wishing the encounter would just go faster, so that you might go home and wallow in the shame of being turned down. Well, turned down by a human who didn’t even know what he was doing. Sollux is going to laugh while he’s rubbing your scalp. 

“Can I have a day to think about it?” he asks, then. After that, he giggles a little. His eyelids are drooping. Damnit. “I mean, I thought you guys were gonna sue me.” 

You’re nonplussed by the fact, which he delivers with what might be called a wry grin, if that grin was so faded it belonged on the ass of an early 2000s popstar. It’s about now that you realize he’s not wearing the sunglasses he was sporting for your entire last encounter. 

Maybe that’s why you’re not pitch anymore? Is that the reason you’re vacillating? You were so sure, though. You thought you ditched the vacillating back in high school. 

You want so badly to be pitch for him. 

Fuck. 

Strider lists to the side a bit, and he rubs his eyes, and you have absolutely no doubt that you want to watch over him like a flushed lover might. Sollux has been fine with you being poly-pale before, he’d be okay with Dave staying with you until he’s slept at least ten hours. 

“Yeah,” you tell him, and he perks up a little. 

Fuck, that’s pathetic. 

“I’ll get out of your hair. And be back tomorrow,” you say. He nods. 

For a second, you can see yourself offering up the spare bedroom Sollux recently vacated. It’s common for moirails to live together, but he moved in with his matesprit. She’s filthy fucking rich. And also neighbors with his kismesis. Thinking back to the night you met this sorry sack of human, you realize he was also flirting with his rust friend. Does she live nearby? 

You know Feferi would let her live with them, if she wanted. Sollux wants to have two in every quadrant. He be like that. And Fef loves for Sollux to be happy. 

“I’ll order you a bunch of food when you wake up, as payback for the clowns,” you tell Dave, and he just mutely nods. “So text me.” 

You write your number down on a piece of paper, nice and big, and you tape it to his refrigerator. 

“I’ll remember the free food bit,” he says, chuckling into his sleeve. Yeah, he’s way gone. 

After stomping out the door, you wait and listen, to see if he’s gonna fasten all the locks again. He does. 

Okay. Duty done. 

_YOU’RE WELCOME, BITCH_

_Th8nks, prolapsed rectum :::;)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> still fighting the depresso but i read every comment, and every one of them gives me another reason not to collapse into a hole, haha. love you all! the song mentioned is based off into the night by say anything. im really on a say anything kick recently RIP


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! it's been a month, and i wrote most of this while feeling kind of sour! let me know about any typos, please, and i hope you have a wonderful week! <3

The first time you wake up, your face is plastered to your little kitchen table. 

Cans is licking your mouth. 

Groaning, you gently swat the cat away. Her little cold nose, and the silent conversational ‘wake up father, this has gone on long enough’ are all you need to sit up. It’s night time, now, and your desire to go back to sleep is outweighed by literally nothing. 

Cans is making a pretty good case, however, because as soon as you droop just a little toward the spit-stained table surface, she makes to put her cold-ass nose right back on your face. 

“Fine, fine,” you say, and you can’t even really remember why you’re at the table, and you don’t care. There’s a set of numbers scribbled across your shopping list. What? Ugh. 

You know what, don’t care. Don’t care what-so-fucking-ever. Cans purrs happily when you dump a generous amount of food into her bowl. She doesn’t bother you again as you grab the note, and try to process what the numbers are. 

_It’s a phone number,_ you think. 

And you fall into your bed in the pitch-dark apartment. 

\----------

Second time you wake up, you sit up straight, heart hammering, and inspect the crumpled note in your right hand. It’s got a phone number on it. 

You drop the paper on the floor, and go back to sleep. 

\----------

Third time, you stay awake for good. It’s about 8 in the morning, when you look at your alarm clock. If you’re remembering correctly, that means you’ve been asleep for eighteen hours. Eighteen Whole Hours.

And then some change. 

With a stretch, you rub the sleep crust from your eyes. There’s a stiff bit of skin where drool has stuck to your face. It feels like your hair is absolutely insane. And you stink like high heaven. Fuck. 

A few kids shout outside your apartment, probably down on the ground, and you kinda want to turn back over and pass out again. Somehow, past you had the foresight to not schedule any gigs, and give yourself this week off. Still, you reach for your phone where it always is. 

Your hand ends up searching the bed blindly for maybe a minute before you realize it’s not there. Fuck. Time to open your eyes, then? 

The sunlight is horrible when you finally peel your eyelids back to see the beautiful majesty of the day. 

It only takes one glance around your room to realize that your phone is, for some reason, in the middle of the hall right outside. Huh. 

It only takes one _other_ glance to realize that your apartment is a fucking mess. The hallway is a minefield of cat toys and RedBull cans. Okay, two cans and the rest of it is cat toys. The distinction barely matters, since Cans’ favorite toys are, you guessed it, cans. Little cans with fake bait worms inside, and one really big coffee can that took you hours to sand down so that she could safely fit her whole head in it. 

Bitching and moaning, you rock yourself to sitting, and then roll your ass over to the edge. She must have knocked over the little fort you’d constructed for her next to her cat tree. Old wrapping paper and toilet paper tubes are also toys she likes. 

You have an incredibly weird cat. 

“Princess?” you croak, shifting to your feet. A very gentle meow comes from further in the apartment, probably the kitchen. 

The air conditioning kicks on. 

Hugging your arms around your freezing nips, you walk out. Breakfast time, soon? 

A bell tinkles from down the hall, and you see a little scrappy, fluffy void peering at you around the corner. She meows again, and you roll your eyes. Okay, so she definitely knocked over Cans’ Town (the fort) while you were asleep. Her paw shoots out to swat one of the tubes, and it rolls toward you. ‘Library’. Yeah. Godzilla has struck Tokyo once more in its time of peril. 

“Hi bean,” you say, rubbing your eyes again. 

For some reason, it makes your right eye sting. Fuck, that hurts. 

An inspection of your thumb shows an ink stain. So you just rubbed residual sharpie into your own eye. Cool. 

Why would there be an ink st-- _**the note**_

It’s a short pivot and sprint back to your room, and the day before comes rushing back to you. Terrible sleep, nightmares for a week, images of ICP of all things, and you couldn’t get them to stop without going out and getting mobbed by those shitty people and their cameras. Karkat shows up at noon, looking mad as all fuck, and you weren’t even sane enough to have the proper fear of death in your heart. 

_”… offer you the job.”_

_Everything but Karkat’s face kind of fizzled out of your Zone of Giving Fucks._

_A job??_

_You can feel yourself saying stuff, and you can hear a conversation happening, and you think you might have said you wanted to think about it??_

_He leaves. There’s a paper with his numbers._

_You lay down your head on the table._

_He looks really hot in his outfit, but you hate it so. Much._

Fuck!!!

**Why did you say you would think about it?**

You very nearly avoid slipping on a fucking metal road hazard, and trip into your bed, scrambling in the blankets for the note. Paper crinkles from the floor under your toes, and Jesus. This is such a big opportunity. No matter what, this would get your pictures on the goddamn map. And you could get a percentage of merch sales! 

You could buy and host your own website!

The note flies out of the covers as you rip the top blanket off the bed, and sure enough, there’s ten digits preceded by a 1. Eleven numbers, Texas area code, and it’s followed by a name. Jackpot. Holy shit, who cares if he hates you? His people want to hire you!

By nature of the situation, the next thing that happens is that you trip on your way to your phone, get some rug burn on your knee, and find that your phone is dead. Fuck. Shit. Damn. Where’s the charger? 

It takes way too long for you to find your phone charger, and it takes WAY too long for it to show two percent on the loading screen after it reboots itself. 

By that point, you’re nervously cleaning up Cans’ Town. This time, you set them into a pyramid, so it’s less likely to fall. Cans has a lot of fun hindering this exercise. She has even more fun hiding behind the pyramid, and pouncing on it as soon as you finish.

You turn on all the lights in the apartment, turn them off again, put on some pants, change into jeans, back into pajamas. 

It takes all of three minutes. 

At this point, you’re trying to calm yourself. Deep breath in, deep breath out. 

You hold the button, and your phone comes on. 

Within another three minutes, your poor phone is choking on notifications. Aradia, worried about you, has left about seven voicemails and sent seventeen different texts. There’s some texts from your brothers, from your sisters, from John. Jade just left a simple message, but you know she’s on vacation. Everyone is worried, or concerned, or they’re Dirk. 

Being Dirk means he thinks he’s done something wrong, literally all the time. So he’s asking why you’re mad at him. 

A few app notifications and emails concerning work, and a generous tip on Paypal from the wedding people. Good, good. Fuck yeah. Fried chicken for dinner.

You clear all of it. 

And you enter Karkat’s number, double-checking his neat capital-letter handwriting to make sure you got it right. 

_I’m in._

\----------

True to form, you’re sitting on your bed. Fresh Prince is playing on your old laptop, and your bed is littered with iHop takeout containers. There’s pancakes, chicken and waffles, fried eggs, et cetera. Cans is cleaning her paws of her own lunch, curled into your side. 

She grumbles when you stretch for more chocolate milk. 

The food is putting you in some kind of contented haze that you know you’ll be regretting when you’re constipated as fuck tomorrow, but right now, it couldn’t be better. 

Then there’s a text from an unknown number. It ain’t from Karkat, he’s registered as a crab emoji in your phone. Due to the crabbiness. Cause he texts in all caps and with all the social grace of a geriatric republican. 

_This is Vriska. Meet me at my office in the Producer’s 8uilding at three. Bring a portfolio. Don’t 8e l8._

\----------

The building is pleasantly cold as you saunter in, heading immediately toward the front desk. Maybe you could get your parking validated here. 

The troll at the desk shakes their head and points toward the elevator before you can even open your mouth. Okay, mystery solved. Another mystery comes up, though, when you see how many fuckin’ eyes they have. With his douchebag-emo hair, and ugly ‘man-bun’, it seems like one. The other one probably got stabbed to death by his one visible eyebrow. You know enough about Alternian to see that the name on his nametag starts with a ‘t’ sound. Cool.

He looks like he thinks _way_ too much of himself, and makes the other person pay on dates every time by shaming them into it. Ugh. 

“Fifth floor,” he says, with a bit of a sneer.

Trolls. 

Whatever, you can afford it with the tip money. It’s not that much to pay for a really great fucking job interview anyway. 

The floors are squeaky-shiny, some kind of creamy white that reflects you better than your spit-flecked bathroom mirror. The elevator doors have some kind of engraved symbol on them in the center. 

The smaller of your two portfolios smacks into the door as it almost closes on your heel. It’s the only one you brought, since the other one is mainly for transporting drawings and materials. This one is pristine and unbent, as well, so it’s great for your eighteen-by-twelve glossy prints. 

Stepping out of the elevator, you come face-to-face with a sea of desks. It’s an open office style, which seems like a weird environment for the ‘producer’s floor’. Maybe this is just level one of the producer floor? 

“Down the hall, last door on the right,” the troll at the desk tells you, with one glance. Looking around, there aren’t many humans here. Just a couple, like a minority allowance in a show on the CW. That bit makes you laugh, and the troll at the desk looks at you strangely before raising an eyebrow. 

“Was just thinking that like, the amount of uh, humans,” you start, and after that, the troll gets a look on her face like she just can’t _wait_ for you to finish. Oh god. Okay. 

Shoes squeaking on the still-impossibly-shiny floor, you heel turn and adjust your blazer. Right. 

You wore your nicer blazer and a sharp polo underneath, and your nicest pair of jeans. It’s not some kinda stiff job, after all, right? 

You also don’t own a suit. 

Damnit. 

The last door on the right is open, and the alarm on your phone goes off just after you step in. It was set for five minutes before the hour. Score, on time. After silencing it, you take a minute to look around. The room doesn’t look like a producer’s office to you. Actually, it looks like the entrance to a recording studio. But this is where they directed you to? 

A bit of music floats out to you. It’s some kind of darker tone, something weirdly sensual. Uh. Okay. Is she gonna try to seduce you or something? You thought she was a lesbian?

When you walk out into a sound editing area, you know you’ve been had. 

_”Don’t be aroused, by my confession,”_ you hear, and you freeze. Karkat’s got his side turned toward you, and he looks mildly uncomfortable singing whatever it is. It’s not like the music you’ve heard so far, in your vague perusal. Is it like, a new song? 

“Okay, stop, stop, you sound like a twelve year old asking a kid to prom,” another voice comes, from in front of you and to the right. A quick glance around the corner, and you see Sollux. 

“Then what the fuck do you want me to do?” Comes an irritated tone, in high-definition in the recording room, as Sollux briefly unplugs his headphones. He plugs them back in, and the remainder of the grumbling is cut off. He’s not leaning into the mic, so you don’t hear it too well. 

“Just start from the uh, that verse you liked,” Sollux says. 

Karkat visibly sighs. 

“Fine,” you see him mouth, and he leans back into the mic. His breaths slow down, get heavier in the mic, and your face heats up. Okay, yeah, maybe you should get out before you’re forced to sign a whole preemptive NDA. 

_”Jesus has risen; it’s no surprise,”_ he sighs, and you take a step back, trying to use the music to cover your movements. _”Even he would martyr his momma to ride to Hell between those thighs.”_

Sollux laughs into the mic, growling a little, and Karkat grimaces at him, waving him away and looking mildly sick. 

“You’re my moirail, don’t make me barf,” he nearly yells, and you can hear it through the glass. 

YEAH OKAY you’re leaving. 

Unfortunately, fate has other plans. 

Right as your foot squeaks on the one space of tile that isn’t covered in old shag rugs like every recording studio ever, the music goes off. 

Sollux catches your reflection, looking only mildly surprised. And of course, Karkat looks up, and his face morphs into a burning glare that your pants-friend is attempting to see as sexy, given the context. Your stomach-friend makes you feel like you should be vomiting, though. 

“STRIDER,” Karkat shouts, and before you can trip on another rug, he’s in front of you, door swinging behind him. 

“Why are you here?!” he snaps, holding a finger up to your face. Your burning fucking face. Humiliated you found him attractive for even a quarter of a second. 

“They directed me here?” you say, pointing a thumb behind you. 

Sollux laughs outright, and Karkat rolls his eyes, smacking one hand to his forehead. 

“Of course they decided to mess with you,” he says, and glances back at Sollux for a second before walking around you and yanking the back of your shirt. “Come on, I’ll talk to her.”

His stormy eyes at least aren’t on you anymore, and instead glaring at the troll at the desk, who just snickers behind her hand. It’s a short ride up three more floors, past marketing and merchandising, as the elevator so helpfully points out. He lets go of your shirt at the eighth floor, wherein there is a hallway of yet more immaculate flooring. 

This time, you walk (behind him) up to a proper fogged-glass office door. 

Karkat pushes it open forcefully, and scowls at the woman behind the desk. Unlike when you saw her previously, she’s wearing a slick pantsuit, and her legs are crossed as she sits on the top of her desk, examining the watch on her wrist. 

“You’re late, Dave,” she says, without looking up. 

Karkat sighs at her. “Your shithead employees sent him to me,” he says.

She doesn’t look surprised. In fact, she looks mildly delighted. 

“Did they?” she asks. Karkat answers only by flipping her the bird, and swinging right back out the door. 

Vriska watches him leave gleefully, eyes narrow and calculating. Her whole aesthetic right now would be pretty hot if you were into her. Rose once told you that ‘a woman in a pencil skirt and dark sheer hosiery with cleavage showing is sexier than should be possible, and I absolutely rue the fact that I am not suited for an office environment.’

You believe her, even if you don’t see it. 

Maybe you should introduce them. 

“Did you have a nice drive into town?” she asks you, then. 

Vriska gestures to a chair, walks around her desk, and sits down in her own. 

“Uh, yeah,” you say. 

She grins. 

Fucking diabolical grin. 

It gives you an icky feeling. 

“Now, I assure you, I am not going to rip you off as an artist,” she says, and slides a sheaf of papers across the desk toward you. In return, you hand her your portfolio. It’s got a business card in the front page, and then a series of your best photos as decided by you. Karkat’s face is in there, as well. 

“All I will ask is that your work for us will be only used through our approved venues, and that you don’t sign with any other music groups until then.”

That’s it? What about non-disclosure? 

“I had Terezi write up the contract, and while it is bulletproof, she seems fond of you,” Vriska continues, allowing no word in edge-wise. “So she gave some kinder allowances than I would have.” 

You nod, reading down the first page.

Second page.

All the legalese is a bit troublesome to navigate, but while you’re reading, you’re also deep breathing to calm down from that whole embarrassing fiasco before. Rose has taught you what to look for, in contracts. So you’re able to scan without really picking it apart. 

“I have no reason to lie,” Vriska says, then, filling the silence while you’re being uncharacteristically focused. Money is a very important thing to be focused on. “Since we need you.” 

At that, you glance up. She’s making a twisted little frown that looks like she hates saying the words she’s uttered. Ha. 

“Classist trolls are common in photography, and Karkat is a lowblood,” she explains, rolling her eyes. “Besides the fact that trolls, with our skin and eyes, are hard to get accurate photos of. And you managed to, somehow.”

Haha. 

Good to know. 

Third page. 

“So, we will give you fifteen percent on gross print sales not including autograph fees, as well as five percent on other merch that uses your work. There needs to be money toward the talent, me, the other production, and the other staff.” 

Whoa, what?

She sees your surprise and shrugs. 

“I know it’s quite a bit, but you will be doing all of our photo work,” she responds, examining her short blue nails. “That means coming to shows, shoots, tours, and any other contracted work I request.” 

You lay down the contract atop the table.

Oh. Shit. 

That’s a lot. 

“That’s long hours,” you tell her. 

“We will also be providing you with full benefits and a yearly salary, which will be lower but with sales on top of that and contracted shoots, for which you will receive a stipend, it should be more than enough,” she says, and then looks up at you. “It’s a five year contract. Should the band expire before then, you will receive a severance. If they do not, you will be given references and broader privileges of groups to photograph under the label, and hopefully renew your contract with us.”

Your eyes widen a fraction more. 

Holy shit. 

This is like, a real gig. 

“Do I retain rights to my name?” you ask, reaching for a pen on her desk. 

She grins, pleased. 

“Yes,” she replies. “You can also retain rights to your twitter, and your name will be on every shoot and every credited photo. Sollux even knows how to encrypt pictures so that they cannot be illegally downloaded in high definition.”

And she knows she has you. 

“Can you hire someone to take care of my cat while we’re on shows?” you ask her. 

Hook, line, and sinker. 

“You can even bring her with you, if she’s one of those cats that likes travel.”

“Really?” you ask, and Jesus. Holy shit. This is too good to be true. 

“Nepeta loves kitties.” 

And yeah. 

You say it again. 

“I’m in. I’m fucking _in._ ”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys! i know its been awhile, but i had a breakup, and then started a new job -_-;;; so, yeah lol
> 
> but im continuing this for some reason! so, here we go! im gonna try to work on the next chapter to be up sooner, ive got some great ideas. yeet

Your friends – or bandmates, since they obviously have thrown friendship out the window by now – are just being cruel at this point. Sollux, maybe, you might be able to see an indirect method of helping you get what your shitty instincts want. 

But everyone else? 

Putting you in a car with your pitch crush?

They’re just laughing at you, you know they are. 

Last week, they decided to stage an intervention. They all want you to get laid, or fulfilled in a concupiscient quadrant, or something equally shitty. What you got from that is that they want you to stop openly thirsting after Dave’s disgusting human-brown-pink-thin-curly-haired-ass, and denying it.

The intervention basically went, 

_”hey KK, stop torturing this kid with a lack of intentions but an overt amount of body language,”_

_“no, fuckos”_

_“okay so we’re going to meddle”_

Exactly like that.

It’s been a full ten days since Strider came onto the team. And while he’s mostly been working with the media production side of the act, having meetings about directions and merchandise production, and having (from what you understand as) laissez-faire discussions on ideas with the online advertising side of things…

You’ve been running into him more than you should have been. 

It’s actually been a conscious effort on your part to not encounter him more than necessary. Which, at this point, should have been maybe twice. Given the number of meetings the whole band has had regarding brand and so on.

Which is two. 

Your one, very public, very stupid, idiotic, and deranged moment of pitch lust has got all your friends on the single most ridiculous and unnecessary tear they’ve ever set their sights on the finish line of. Even Equius, who generally is completely racist and under the impression that mutants like yourself shouldn’t enter the gene pool, thinks you need to get your freak on with this fragile fleshbag.

“Yeah! The tour is next month.”

This fragile fleshbag who is, at this moment, sporting sparkly gold gel nails. Nails he got while on a day out with Terezi, who just won’t shut up about him and how fun he is, for a human. 

“Nah, she said I could only tell you as much as the public knows already. I told you that last night.”

You wish the road noise would drown out his phone conversation. As your luck tends to be, though, you’re in a bit of light traffic. No such excess road noise to speak of. 

“No,” he continues, laughing. His mouth is nice, for a human, you guess. “I don’t care if you’ve texted him ‘five whole times, Dave’, I’m not going to ask him if he’s thinking about you.” 

You glower at him with a practiced aloofness. Practiced every day in the mirror, in fact. No one can know. Strider is smiling on the phone. You know that look so well. 

It’s as pale as pale gets. It’s the same look Gamzee used to get for you, and gives you (temporary) slimy creepy crawlies up your spine as a result. Strider looks like he wants to pap this girl like she’s a puppy. It’s the girl from before, right? From the concert that sealed your very inconvenient fate. Troll, rust, big horns, short lifespan, eleven facial piercings. 

Sollux wants to bone her like a comically spooky skeletal jazz band. One day, it’s gonna be _all_ ribcage xylophone and pelvic clacking.

That girl. 

Strider laughs again. His human corneas shine with it. 

Okay, you’ve officially lost your patience. 

Being shoehorned into a ride with him, two hours out to the abandoned factory your production team approved. Forced to listen to his perfect mouth say infuriating words, that aren’t angering except for the reason he’s saying them. 

How about we discuss some reasons to hate Dave Strider?   
1- Terezi likes him more than you  
2- Your whole band likes him more than you, it seems  
3- He’s fucking perfect, apparently?  
4- He walked in on you practicing that unnecessarily sensual song and probably things you’re horny on main  
5- He knows all the words to _Through the Fire and Flames_ as made famous by the troll cover, as well as that song Pop Stars or whatever that was made by the fucking, that annoying video game Sollux hates to be amazing at? League of Losers?  
6- He is absolutely unfazed by your bad mornings, and even turns a little pink when you’ve slept on wet hair, and it comes out looking like you’ve been tossed in a scuttlebus stampede.   
7- He’s better at making merch for your band than you are, and you founded the fucking thing.   
8- He hates neither Vriska nor Gamzee, platonically _or_ romantically. 

Dave screeches as you wrench the phone from his hands, threatening him with your freshly-manicured claws to get him to stop reaching for it. 

“Sollux likes you, yes. Keep texting him, but remember he has one matesprit already, and that you won’t be the first _or_ the last.” You keep your tone intentionally dry, and hold Dave away. Like he should, he keeps his distance despite reaching for the phone. “…this is Karkat.”

The troll on the other end of the line kind of shrieks. It has very good timing, since Dave decides to lean in a little harder to steal it away. Great timing meaning that you have ample reasoning to hold the thing even farther away from Dave. He’s getting vocal now, and you bare your claws at him again and hiss a warning. It doesn’t stop him loudly protesting and demanding his cellular device. 

But, looking Dave dead in the eyes, you finish the conversation. “You should definitely sleep with him so that he stops talking about how much he wants to drag you onto a horizontal surface. Dave has to work. Bye.”

Dave looks horrified when you throw his phone back at him after hanging up. 

“Why did you tell her that?!” he asks, eyes wide. A small part of you feels guilty about ending the conversation like that. A bigger part feels satisfied at the slowly dropping tone of his skin. 

“Sollux is my moirail, and I will stop him from hurting the poor girl,” you say. And it’s true. Sollux is polyquadranted, and as such generally has two or more people in a quadrant at a time. It’s the reason he’s so fucking chill with your pale blurring, or whatever the tabloids have decided to call it this month. He’s not jealous, not worried about cheating, so on and so forth. 

It’s good, for you. 

With your possibly… pan…. Quadranted?? Nonsense. 

Dave looks enraged. 

“I know you’re in love with her, you can go ahead and get all protective on me,” you tell him, rolling your eyes toward the window. 

But he’s silent, and you don’t hear any fists being raised, or breaths being huffed. A quick glance shows you why. 

He looks curious. Confused, and curious. 

“I’m not in love with her,” he says. 

And if that, the obvious point of denial, is what he got from what you said, maybe he needs to shift his priorities. 

“Yes you are,” you scoff. “Plain as the sniffer on my fucking head.” 

Dave scoffs, this time. “She’s my best friend.”

The deep and pointed sigh that you release next is calculated. It’s calculated like a rocket launch. It’s calculated to deliver the exact right amount of ire, irritation, and tiredness all at once. Calculated to be deep, to be high-pitched, and to have just a pinch of soulfulness. Because you’re about to blow his tiny human pan. 

“You sit on the phone and comfort her about her feelings,” you say, raising up one finger, right before his face. The jewelry on your wrist jingles. Can’t wait to get home and wipe all the gunk off your eyes. 

Dave cocks an eyebrow. 

“You spend half your free time with her, and went with her to something you hate just so that she would be safe,” you say. Second finger flicks up. The middle finger. Your favorite.

Third finger. “You have spoken multiple times, with eyes like diamonds, about how she’s come over to scratch your head and feed your cat while you were waist deep in a project.”

Dave looks a little like he believes you now. 

“She obviously doesn’t want to get into your scrawny human pants-zone,” you say. 

And fifth finger. Dave is a little pink at this point, and making a face like he’s gotten a realization. 

“Her troll-kin love you, you both go to fucking _history museums_ together, and you watch conspiracy theory documentaries in your pajamas eating ice cream and doing each other’s nails.”

Dave has his face in his hands. Humans. So fucking dense. You know he’s regretting having had a public conversation about his weekend plans with his ‘best friend’.

“She said before that she didn’t need a moirail,” he mutters, thinly, and through his palms. 

“That’s because she has you fawning over her, moron,” you say. 

“Oh my god,” he says. 

“Yeah,” you agree. “The only reason this is beyond just regular best friend stuff is the comfort and protective shit. At least for trolls.” 

“Fuck,” he says. 

And you snort, and look back out the window. 

And lo and behold, here you are. 

On your left, what looks like an old troll-government building is looming. You recognize this type of building, from somewhere, but you’re not sure where. It’s not anywhere where bureaucracy would have taken place. The large façade and three floors of solid gray concrete walls would have been much more appropriate for a holding facility. Holding, as in, holding cargo. 

A lot of these places would have been used to store imported goods, like sopor and grubloaf. The last of the more ‘official’ structures would have been ironed out decades ago. In the twentieth century, the troll government dissolved and became a part of the global concourse. 

As you step out of the car, Dave clambers out on the other side, still grumbling. Everyone else is already waiting, gathered around and chatting. Equius goes to help Dave retrieve his equipment from the trunk of the car you rode here in, but he is politely refused. 

The big cargo-door before you has an outline on it. It was once emblazoned with the empress’ seal, but that part has been scrubbed away, or at least there was an attempt at such. Vriska takes out a rusted set of keys, and walks up to a door beside the rolling metal one. She unlocks it, and inside, you can see a short hallway, before she will arrive at a second set of doors. 

“Watch out for needles, guys,” Dave says. His phone is blowing up, but he mutes and pockets it. It’s work time, after all. He may also have a situation with his friend to sort out.

You know what this place is. 

The air that billows out of the cargo door is hot and musty. It smells like age and the suffering of people. Of trolls. There aren’t any buzzers that sound, and there aren’t any guards that come for you. If you didn’t know what to look for, you would be blind to what lies beneath the thick layer of graffiti and dust. 

But, as you stomp into the cavernous space, you can see the outline of a desiccated amphitheater. 

A broad skylight illuminates the seats, rusted and dusty on the cushions. Spray paint tags litter the floor and the walls, and a few doorways and steps are crumbled into mess. Running your fingers over a line of ornate brass filigree, you know. But you didn’t think you’d ever see it. You’d heard of these places. And they should have all been long-gone. 

You’re in a rust-caste snuff theater. 

They would bring the lowest of the low down to these places, a hundred years ago, and they would make them participate in plays. Plays where they were the victim, for the entertainment of blues and purples, and once, even the empress herself. And they were totally legal at the time. 

“This place is going to be torn down tomorrow,” Vriska says. Everyone is quiet. Everyone knows. “So I was really lucky to get permission from the owner. And it cost a pretty penny.” 

“Can we get sued for this?” Nepeta asks, very soft. 

“Nah,” Vriska says. “We won’t mention it in the official record, and I had Rezi do some research on the legality. As long as we don’t mention the Empress by name, we’ll be cool, basically. And the GHB won’t care. He has bigger fish to fry across the galaxy.” 

“This is so bad-ass,” you whisper, before you can think better of it. 

It’s not even that big of a deal. One single band, doing a photoshoot in an old snuff auditorium, covered in graffiti and dirt and bullshit. But it’s so cool. It’s so rebellious, and punk as fuck. 

“Thank Dave for the idea,” Terezi says. Dave is distracted when you whip your chin toward him.

He’s fiddling with setting up what looks like a stand for soft lighting. He’s got a big round reflective disc thing, and another tripod strapped to his back, for his camera. The bag looped over his right elbow will have the extra batteries and lenses in it. Not a lot, given the type of shoot you’re used to. 

A whole new view of him as a human comes over you. Like a cooling wave on a hot beach. Foam of notions and reconciliation of past anger tries to pelt you like sand. But you bat it away, wipe the feeling from your skin. Not time for that. Time for work.

Gamzee is looking around, a little dazed. He doesn’t really seem to grasp the situation, which is fine by you. Nepeta is walking out in the middle of the stage, Equius is casting his gaze about the building and very obviously checking for intruders or vagrants. Sollux has his hands in his pockets. 

Both you and he would have been culled a century ago. Maybe even in a place like this. 

He’s got a frown on his face.

Fuck. 

“I told Dave’s friend that she should say she wants to bone your bulge,” you say. That gets his attention, and he looks up at you with a grin. 

“No way,” he says, and some of that familiar tinge of eagerness creeps back into his eyes. You can’t make any overt displays in company like this. But later, you might settle him down in a bath and wash his back. Remembering that he was almost helmed isn’t a good thing for him. 

“Yeah, he did,” Dave grumbles, chiming in.

Sollux lets out a soft ‘yis’, and Dave groans and says something about not wanting to hear anything about it, just take care of her or he’ll kill him.

Of course Sollux takes the opportunity to give a short diatribe on Aradia’s thick thighs taking care of him, instead. Of course Dave burns at the eyes, but doesn’t lunge for him. Too much expensive equipment to risk a fall.

\----------

On the way back from the photoshoot, Dave is flipping through the pictures on his tablet. The screen on his camera is too small to really see them, so he’s connected some kind of cord. Everyone pushed for the same seating arrangements as on the way out there, even Sollux. Apparently he’s doing a good job of distracting himself by texting the girl. 

“I swear to fuck, if he does anything to Aradia—“ 

“Spare me the blustering, fucktruck,” you snap, talking over him. 

Dave squawks, and you steal away the tablet. There are some really good shots on here. It had taken a few hours, but Dave had gotten a few different locations, group shots and individuals in each. The current folder you’re going through has 217 images in it, some of them clusters of the same image, taken for possible blur. There are pics of the five of you lounging on the amphitheater chairs, from in front and behind. Those are good, you feel. They’re the most sophisticated. Then there are a few of you all walking down the stairs, interacting in the hallway and silhouetted by light, crouching in a circle, looking in all different directions and poses, and all that. 

It’s a lot. 

Your favorite, though, by far, are the few that he got on the stage. Those were the most dramatic, the most poignant. While the ones on the chairs would be good for, say, an album cover, the ones on the stage are incredible. Of course, you’re thinking with the context that you have. To anyone else, it’s nothing. 

But Dave managed to get some vibrant expressions, and poses that accentuated the personality of every one of you. It isn’t something you’d ever thought possible, in photographs. Shows what you know, huh. 

“When do I get to meet your purrbeast?” you ask, absently swiping through the solo photo sessions. Personality capturing, indeed. 

Dave pauses in his sulking and muttering, and when you’re looking up, he’s staring at you. 

“You mean Cans?” he asks, a little bewildered. 

“Yeah,” you reply, like there’s nothing more obvious in the world. 

Dave’s face lights up, and you very nearly find yourself enchanted by the expression. 

“I could bring her up to the office, and everyone could meet her,” he says. 

Humans and their purrbeasts. 

But he looks so happy, that—

“I’ll ask Vriska when everyone will be in,” you say, and look back down. “We need to meet her before the trip, at least.”

Dave settles back into his seat. 

Having him as part of the crew maybe won’t be so bad.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey! so i have an idea of some Drama things i want to happen, but for now have some angst and moderate fluff rofl
> 
> i hope you all are doing well and ilysm! <3

CHAPTER 8 – 

It was kinda funny, but you actually found out about the company party through Aradia. 

About a week after the photoshoot, you worked up the nerve to ask her about the quadrant thing. It’d been maybe four days until the band goes on tour, but your convo in the car, the one with Karkat, rattled you a little. Did she want you as a moirail? Was she just avoiding it, because you’d been best friends (John is also your bestie, obviously, but he’s about 1700 miles away, so you’ve understandably got more than one) for going on ten years? 

“I’ll watch your place a few times a week, just to make sure it still looks inhabited,” she said, and then you blurted a messy string of words. You probably spat them on her instead of actually making noise. 

“Doyouwantmeasamoirail? Someone said you do and I don’t wanna make you uncomfortable since I’m a human but you’re really important to me so I wannamakesureyou’rehappy—“

Aradia clapped her hand over your mouth, eyes sparkling. 

There was laughter in her face, and she had eighteen bobby pins in her fingers that were stabbing you in the face. Her nose bridge piercings were moving as she scrunched up her eyebrows. It was obvious enough that you knew she was messing around when she dropped her palm to the front of her kigurumi.

“Dave Emma Strider, are you propositioning me?” she gasped.

For a second there you thought you were fucked. 

Then she held up her left hand in what you knew was one half of a diamond. 

When you matched it hesitantly, she pulled you across the sofa and into the softest hug you’d ever imagined. 

Really, it was so fucking soft. It wasn’t until that point that you realized you hadn’t really _hugged_ her before. Side hugs, some hello and goodbye hugs, but nothing so substantial. You, at that moment, finally appreciated boobs for their squish factor. In the un-sexiest way possible. But you appreciated them a lot all the same. And she smelled nice, as always, and her hair was really soft, and you felt so fucking safe.

Didn’t realize how safe you’d always felt around her, until then.

“Now we get to match when we go to the band party,” she cooed into the top of your head. Aradia’s grip was kind of like being gently cradled by stone. 

She was more of a statue than a troll at certain times, especially with how she stared. And the goat pupils. 

The soft thrumming in her chest wasn’t super statuesque, though. Given that it was her, you related it distantly to like, the sound of far-off sheep. But in a vibration rather than a sound itself. Even though sounds are, in essence, vibrations. And the fact that the metaphor had gotten completely out of hand.

But uh, yeah. 

You found out about the party from her, initially. 

Right after that, you realized she’d said party, and that you didn’t know anything about it. And right after _that_ , you received a text from Vriska. About the party. 

Okay, cool. 

Neat. 

So, while you were in a pile, snug with your face comfy on top of her spheres, she purred a lot and told you exactly what you were going to wear to the party. Because you were going to match, of course. The matching horn cufflinks and necklace had been sitting in her bedside table for ages. 

After that, it was back to the Pompeii documentary.

And then to the present.

The idea to go as a couple is a little strange to you, but hella fucking baller in visual concept. You in a black-velvet-and-sequin blazer and your nicest jeans, and her in this adorable black velvet number that, strangely, doesn’t look as trashy as it sounds on paper as you roll up to the office the night of the soiree.

Since you know she’d love it, you internally describe her as a character from a very familiar, very bad Harry Potter self-insert fanfic. 

She has on torn black fishnets, black shiny combat boots, no bra, and a sequined plunge cocktail dress that goes down to her knees to retain a semblance of whatever class she wants to have. She looks like a big huge slut, and definitely _gothic._ The ram skull tattoo on her chest shows through the devastatingly deep neckline of the dress, horns curving around and spiraling out. Black eyeliner, black ‘goffick’ lipstick, and hair pretty and black. Piercings all set with black studs and bars for the occasion.

As if reading your internal monologue, she grins at you sideways. 

At around nine, you step out of your car in front of the company building. Equius is standing outside the main entrance with another two security officers. There’s a humble line of trolls milling about, which is weird, given that it’s not a night club or anything. 

At the door, one of the security comes up, and holds an arm in front of you. You raise your eyebrows at him, and he opens his mouth like he’s about to tell you that only the Very Important are allowed. Equius steps forward and moves the man aside, shaking his head. 

“If you aren’t going to look at my absolutely BULLETPROOF guest list,” he starts, and you can practically hear the capitalization. He’s also giving Aradia a very tangible once-over, and you let your sunglasses slide down your nose so that you can stare at him eye-to-eye. The guy immediately grows _visibly_ damp, and pulls a cloth from his jacket. 

You gotta get better at being intimidating, since trolls are such a tough bunch. Jade once very gleefully said that your flat blank stare made her want to die, but that’s not really what you’re going for. For now, you’ll have to settle for wigging out the literal most weenie-hut member of this posse. 

Karkat would be an excellent muse for learning how to glare, huh.

“If you aren’t going to memorize the list,” Equius says again, looking very deliberately at the guard and not anywhere else. “Then do not come to work.” 

The security at least looks a little cowed, and steps aside so that you can be led inside by one of the other miscellaneous personnel. There are some gasps and funny looks from the line of people outside. Aradia snorts, unimpressed. She might be in the same position as they are, had you not made a significant impression on her favorite band’s lead singer. 

For now, you won’t mention it. 

Pointing out her hypocrisy might ruin her mood, after all. 

“One of my men will take you to the roof, mister Strider,” Equius says, and you pat him on his mysteriously damp shoulder as you pass. 

Now, let’s take a minute.

Without any jokes, it’s kind of surreal. 

You were thrilled about the job, and about the paychecks, when you signed on. 

But you never in a million years thought you’d actually be treated like you were important. 

The minor amount of fame is unsettling, if anything. Being watched by people and gawked at are always things you’ve gone for as sort of a statement. However, there’s a big difference between walking into a VIP party on a downtown rooftop with a sequined blazer, and wearing a red suit to Junior Prom. 

If you think too hard about it, the amount of people who give a shit about what you do, now, is overwhelming. 

Pissing a celebrity off on twitter is nothing new to you; you’ve done it before. But since you’re not like, important, people didn’t care too much beyond meme value. It’s just kind of part of what John tells you is a healthy amount of chaotic energy that you give off. 

Soooooooooo you’re doing your best to stay busy and not talk about it yet.

You haven’t even told your siblings, let alone John or Jade. Aradia has been sworn to some amount of secrecy, with a contract and everything, but yeah. It’s just a lot. Rose and Dirk know you’re working on a slightly higher profile job, and that’s why you’ve ghosted on half your social media. Roxy is busy with her government commission with climate change or whatever, so you’ve been able to get away with it. 

It makes you feel guilty to be keeping it from everyone. 

If they knew, it would all sink in. It would suddenly be more real. And it would have very real effects on your life, beyond the prospect of paychecks and going on paid road trips with your cat.

With this party being thanks to you, you’ll get a lot of attention. You might even need to check out earlier to maintain the calm façade you attempt to show other people. 

Specifically, the party is there to celebrate sales. Thanks to your success, the first rounds of ticket sales and merch already sold out, as well as VIP spots and photo-op sessions with the band. It was a record, for Castejacket. Several days, actually. Nothing too extreme, just really good news. 

You haven’t been paid for anything but the photoshoot and some compensation for time, yet, and that bit went straight into your college debt to pay off what little was left. Paying your way through school on commissions and scholarship was only enough to cover about 70% of fees and tuition. 

Vriska tells you that your first _real_ paycheck will blow your little pants off, and you don’t really know what to do about that, either. Unbridled success was always the thing your siblings had. You always just kinda… made it. And you were good with that. A hundred percent good, as long as you were comfortable, and surrounded by people you love. 

You love excess and ridiculousness, in theory. But in real life, it isn’t something you can totally comprehend. 

Maybe you’ll start putting care packages for homeless folks in your car. That could be nice. 

Maybe you could even get a more eco-friendly car than your old rust bucket.

The work isn’t much more than you would have been doing without the gig. Fifty to sixty hours a week-pretty typical for someone who lives on art commissions. And you were able to close your commissions entirely, with just the promised minimum salary in the contract. There was some backlash from your online fans, but only a little. 

For the most part, you’ve gotten a lot of excitement and praise. A surprising amount of your followers are apparently trolls, and they know about the thing with Karkat from twitter and stuff. So there’s suspicion in your small facebook fan group that you’re closing commissions because of Castejacket, but they don’t know exactly why. 

A hiatus notice was easy to put up on your more professional photography page, citing a closed contract as the reason. There aren’t any jobs lined up, and the wedding season is passed. So no issues there. 

But the praise from the people at the company itches under your skin. It’s unfamiliar, and in that it feels entirely undeserved. You’re just a guy.

The security lead you to an elevator along one of the inner hallways of the building. It’s one you haven’t seen before. In the darkness and the quiet, there are only a few wall lights lit. Footsteps echo.

“Creepy!” Aradia exclaims, and you snort a bit once you finish jumping out of your skin. 

Lost too much in your own thought, or something. 

She looks at you, mild concern flickering across her features, and you shrug it off. She shrugs in return, and clasps both hands around your wrist as the elevator slides open. 

It’s a service elevator, and there’s another guy just standing inside the elevator, waiting. You’re not body-scanned or anything, and the guy who led you here waves a single time as the doors close. The dude in the elevator is also silent, even as he pushes buttons and stands there. He doesn’t even look at you a little. 

Aradia looks over at the same time you do, and the two of you share a look. 

The elevator moves skyward, and a certain unknowable feeling sets in. 

The ding of the elevator very nearly changes the color of the night itself. The doors open to a little glass-enclosed veranda, outside of which is a thumping party. 

It’s a closed event, so it’s not too big. About the size of a small wedding, actually. 

Gamzee is closest to the doors. He’s in a corner pulled off to the side, and you see him through one of the broad windows of the veranda. Somehow, his eyes look less glazed than usual. A sharper wit than normal peeks through, and he meets your gaze with a nod. 

He’s surrounded by a cluster of trolls, and maybe three humans. They seem to be passing the hose on a hookah that you very well know doesn’t have tobacco in it. Lots of pillows, low lights, a table with scattered glasses. Best stay away from that. 

Just a feeling. 

The thumping of the party is coming from speakers set into a few places on the rooftop. You point them out to yourself immediately. Better use those later to avoid conversation. Aradia tugs you forward, and the two of you step out into the mood lighting on the roof. 

Lights are strung between poles, around the edge, and on every available table there is a small fogged-glass lamp set with a little warmly-colored candle. 

There’s a line of tables on one wall, featuring what you believe to be troll food. For a minute, as you pass it, Aradia very nearly slows down to inspect it. Must be fuckin good, then. Some of it is moving. More things to avoid, apparently. 

Terezi and Vriska are talking to a group of what looks like suited important people in another corner. There’s a table with some expensive-looking alcohol bottles on it. You hear the kind of laughter that’s usually accompanied by humor at another person’s expense. 

In the air is a constant hum of low chatter, and you can only just see details through the bodies.

The sheer amount of people, however small, is already making you uncomfortable. But you try your hardest to keep it cool. After all, your moirail’s here. She’s got you. The thought makes you feel surprisingly calm. Weird.

Also,

Fuckin lit. 

Speaking of your ‘rail, she pulls you down by the arm she’s gripping for dear life. How is it that she, in her heeled combat pieces of shit and a dress so tight Jesus would faint, is more confident than you are around your own coworkers? 

Aradia half-whispers in your ear, and it makes you laugh until you realize what she’s saying. 

“He hasn’t stopped looking at you since we walked out!”

Uh. 

“Who?” you ask.

She actually pulls back, to give you a _look_. It’s one of those kinds of looks that people get really good at by a young age if they’re assigned female at birth. Like you’ve just asked if mud is edible. Uh, yes, but what the fuck why aren’t you seeing the important bits here?

“What?” you ask, pulling your mouth into a frown. 

“Karkat, of course,” she says. 

Uh. 

Okay?

She can tell you’re not getting it, so instead, she starts pulling you in yet another direction. On the way to where you’re being yanked, you’re accosted by all four different servers. One of them has some kind of bite-size tart, one of them has what looks like cake balls but you’re not dumb enough to make _that_ mistake twice. The other two have drinks. 

By the last one, Aradia gets tired of playing nice and just takes the drinks, thanks the troll, and hands you one. So this neon-blue liquid is burning your throat, and she’s nearly spilling hers on your pressed white shirt, and then you get to them. 

The remainder of the party has passed you in a blur, very literally. But here, in their very own section, is the rest of the band. Meaning, three of them. And what seems like some people they know, who look simultaneously too casual and too dressed up. They seem important. There are a few people you can tell are artists by their general demeanor. A few more, you feel like might be musicians. Karkat is talking to them and most definitely _not_ looking at you. He’s acting amiable, gesturing with his hands, in yet another truly ridiculous outfit. 

This one is like, a giant sweatshirt that you can tell has been artfully designed to _be_ too big. And some jeans that have safety pins up the side. Jesus. 

Hello, middle school Dave’s wardrobe. 

Does he do this to _force_ you into fits of secondhand embarrassment, or is he really just that much of an overblown edgelord?

Sollux immediately walks up to you as you near their section of roof, getting close to Aradia. In the process, he gets closer to you than you’re comfortable with. 

“Hello there,” he says, very deep, and vocalizes something you wouldn’t be able to hear, were you not waaaaay too close to him. 

Both your rail and her crush look at you sidelong. 

You blank on what’s going on. 

They look back to each other when you say nothing. 

“You wore the dress I bought you,” he says, and Karkat pauses his conversation in the background to groan. 

Nepeta is staring at you, enraptured. 

“ _Grubs_ , that’s what you were ordering?” Karkat exclaims, and you switch to looking at him, instead. There’s a troll sitting next to him who’s wearing a pink, silky jumper-thing. It doesn’t look lazy or too informal, though. It looks fancy as fuck. Maybe it’s not a jumper? What are those called? Body suits? Uhh. There’s a baby word for it, but you’re blanking. 

Anyway, she’s fixated on Aradia. She looks fascinated, tilting her head to the side. When she does, the gold on her horns glimmers in the light. There must be fifty pieces of jewelry weighing her down. And she’s got…. Fins? 

Do trolls normally have fins? 

Sollux and Aradia completely ignore Karkat. In character true to himself, he splutters.

You grimace, and squeeze Aradia’s hand before detaching yourself. 

She goes, but keeps one palm pressed gently to your shoulder. Sollux is looking at you expectantly. 

You really aren’t getting it. 

“They want to know if you approve of Sollux, idiot,” Karkat calls out. 

Several of the people around him laugh, and you recognize a couple of musicians, now. One of them in particular rasps when she laughs, and has to take a breath or two before recovering herself. She’s a troll, so you can probably gather that it’s a cultural thing.

The circle of Dave’s obliviousness may never end.

“Oh, uh,” you stammer, embarrassed. You knew this party was a bad idea. 

Aradia immediately snarls at Karkat. A seriousness overtakes his face again, brow shrinking back from incredulity and laughter. The trolls who were laughing get a little quieter, and Karkat himself raises his palms in what is more likely mocking than authentic surrender. 

“It’s fine,” you tell her. The floor is oddly interesting. You shove your hands into your pockets, and scuff your shoe on a rooftop pebble. The alcohol is making you feel impulsive, but it’s gently ebbing into your senses. The other people out here don’t matter all that much. “Yall are fine by me.” 

Sollux makes a couple Alternian words with his mouth. Aradia cocks her chin at him before laughing. You know she doesn’t speak a lot of her home planet’s language, but she understands enough to get by in conversation with someone who’s bilingual. 

“He said thank you, in the traditional way,” she tells you, next. 

Ah. 

Neat.

You shuffle in place a bit while she makes heart-eyes at Mr. ‘I-Have-No-Idea-How-So-Many-Women-Find-You-Attractive.’

“Get over here so they can go get a room,” Karkat says, and the fin-troll next to him cackles. She gets to her feet, and she’s hella tall. She doesn’t even need her heels to be tall. Behind her, a couple of guys you hadn’t noticed slip from the shadows. They have ear-pieces. Secret…. service?? The hell?

Now with your approval, they move away from you. One last look from Aradia, of course, but after that you wave her off. 

Karkat’s moving to the side, holding some kind of bright green slime crepe in one hand. The other is patting the bench. Maybe he’s drunk? Being awfully friendly. 

“So you guys are together?!” Nepeta exclaims, as soon as you find your ass a parking spot. Everyone is still kinda mid-shuffle, so you hope your response is gonna get lost in the noise of it. 

“Yeah,” you say, half-empty drink between both hands. You’re lost, now. Looking up at Aradia, she looks so happy and flustered you can’t possibly say no. You might have to make some noise about Sollux’s fuckin hand, tho. Creeping a little low there, buddy. 

“Karkat makes quite the matchmaker,” you drawl, glancing toward Nepeta.

That bit was sarcastic, but Nepeta gets weird about it anyway. Seems like she’s kind of… super thrilled about relationships. Maybe that’s another troll cultural thing you’re just not yet privy to. You thought you’d spent a lot of time around them, already. But maybe Aradia is just so poor she can’t really be as troll-y as you thought she was. From what it seems, a lot of their things are still treated as imports. 

Nepeta is cracking open what looks like… just a can of like, snails. 

Literally a can of snails with the shells still on. You didn’t even know that was a thing here. But she opens the can, chucks the lid behind her and off the roof, and picks a couple out with her claws.

The smell is awful, so you turn away from what she’s doing. 

Karkat is immersed in conversation again. He’s licking his claws, and you can see bits of green crepe sticking to his fingers. The people he’s chatting with are nonplussed by the show of gracelessness, but they’re not disgusted, either. One of them is chewing on their martini umbrella.

Everything kind of fades into the background. 

Being at parties is always kinda like this for you. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s not enjoyable, either. You sip your drink, and then someone finds you a ginger ale, and you sip that instead. Karkat, after his show of friendliness, basically ignores your presence. He’s absorbed in his talk, anyway. Nepeta talks with them, and you add in occasionally.

But for the most part it kind of passes in a blur for you. 

At some point, a little spotlight shines on the veranda, and everyone looks in that direction. Vriska is up on the top of the stairs, and striking a spoon against her glass. The music fades, and chatter goes quiet. 

She thanks you, talks about you for a very personally uncomfortable two minutes, and then goes on to talk about sales and her guests and the important things they’re doing for the band, so on and so forth. ‘Humans… ever the philanthropists, am I right?’ is something you remember her saying. 

The humans laugh, and you stop thinking about how uncharacteristic that was of her to say. 

Eventually, the light dims, the music turns up a bit but not near the volume it was at before. You go by Aradia, lean in to whisper in her ear that you’re going to the bathroom. You don’t know where you’re going, but the bathroom is probably a good place to start. 

The drink still has you feeling a little heady, and you give her a kiss on the cheek before walking off with your hands in your pockets. It makes her laugh, so you count it as a success. 

_We can talk all about the party when I get home tonight, okay?_ is the first message you see when you slip open your phone. The bathroom you go to is the one on the top floor, just down two flights of stairs. There are small, well-made cards that serve as directional signs. 

Who even made those? Advertorial department?

Following the signs, you stare down at the screen in your palm. 

You don’t really know what to reply. But you see Aradia typing something else, and pause in the hall. 

_Thank you for coming to the party and staying as long as you have, Dave,_ she writes. _I’m really proud of you._

You lean against the wall. With no one around, you allow yourself a small grin and a deep breath. It’s blessedly quiet down here, past two sets of doors. The thump of the speakers is still a faint background music to your mental note-taking, but it’s nowhere near as much. 

Maybe you can stay the whole rest of the night. Just a quick rest in relative solitude, right? 

Glancing around, you sidestep into a short alcove. The lights are off in this corner, and you allow yourself a whole other two deep breaths. Yeah, you can do this. A couple more minutes to re-vamp your battery and find some extra disk space, right?

“I can’t believe they gave a speech about him,” a voice says, around a couple coughs. You don’t recognize the voice. 

In your hiding spot, you go very still. There’s some residual capability in you for staying hidden. It activates as if a switch has been hit. You barely even breathe. No reason, even, to be so suddenly invisible. No good reason, anyway. 

“Right?” Another voice says. This one rattles with an Alternian accent. Trolls, then. “Strider’s just riding this situation until it stops spitting out cash.” 

“Yeah, he got lucky,” the first voice confirms. Not bitter, especially, just matter-of-fact. They’re talking about you. Your heart sinks so far into your chest, you don’t know if you’ll ever recover it. 

“None of the humans who get into this industry have even tried to work to get here,” the second voice continues. “I mean, it’s like they look at the diversity points in the tax ledger and just bring them—“

“—hey, he’s not that talented, but it’s better than the previous stuff,” the first voice interjects. “I mean, I don’t think so anyway. But neither of us are photographers.”

“He just jumped right to the top!” the second troll hisses. “He jumped to the top and didn’t even pursue our company.”

“So?”

“I’ve worked here for three years and haven’t seen a raise,” they say, and you can’t really do it anymore. 

You get to your feet, heart pounding, guilt coursing through you. You don’t deserve it, you know that. But you need it. It’s not even that much, is it? 

But you signed the contract instead of finding a troll who was better than you. It’s a job that a troll deserves. No matter what the band mates keep saying about how hard it was to find quality pictures. 

When you turn, they’re there. The two trolls are stopped mid-step, almost. One of them is bright green, face colored in a deep flush. And the other has neon tattoos inked over their arms. That’s the one who actually came from Alternia; they don’t do that kind of ink here on earth. Not anymore. It’s strictly policed. Very strictly. But both of them look somewhat ashamed.

The first one was in Karkat’s talking circle. Sitting maybe six feet away from you the whole night. 

Even as you push past them, carefully sidestepping and skipping the first few steps to put distance between you, they don’t say anything. 

You’re not gonna stick around to tell. 

It’s hard to pull out your phone, and shoot a text to Aradia. But you tell her you have to go early, the socializing was too much. By her reply, she doesn’t believe you. 

You’ll care about it later, once you’re home. 

On the ground floor, you see Karkat. He’s standing there, with his arms crossed, and talking to one of the people from the roof. Their conversation is cool, yet animated and interested. The only thing you hear is a few technical terms.

He meets your eyes, and raises an eyebrow before frowning. 

You salute him, two fingers on your brow. 

You turn on a heel and stick your hands in your jeans pockets as you walk away. Shoulders back, eyes to the ground, in case Aradia is watching from above. Probably not. She was really happy, and you’re really happy for her. 

It’s just…

It’s time to go home, okay? 

You’re tired, and it’s time to go home.

\----------

Packing for a tour isn’t as straightforward as you’d thought it would be. 

Aradia is laying on her back on your bed, smaller than the suitcase flipped open next to her. It’s Rose’s spare suitcase, left at your place ever since your move into this apartment. As such, it’s nice quality, big but not too heavy, durable, and a very gentle shade of lavender that clashes with literally everything you own. 

“You’ll be fine, Dave,” Aradia says, staring up at the phone in her hands. Hasn’t dropped it on her face once, a new record for her. Gravity, meet popsocket. Popsocket, meet Dave’s shopping cart on Etsy. 

“What if I run out of kitty litter?” you ask, mussing your hair. 

There’s another, smaller, suitcase laying on the floor. It’s got an extra leash, collapsible carrier, Cans’ favorite blankets and pillow, food, wet food, litter, treats, toys—

“There are pet stores in places other than Texas,” she snorts. Right. 

Cans purrs from her stomach, revving up like an engine. Full of bees. Just full of warm bees. 

Aradia frees one hand to scratch behind the soft parts of your cat’s ears, and the purring strengthens for a second. It’ll be okay. You’ve got a bunch of stuff, more than she could possibly need. And she’s traveled before, with you, when you were moving. She’s confident and happy, for a cat. 

“You’ll message me every day,” you start again, and begin folding socks. In your mind is lingering this little checklist of worries. Hand-wringing, tired, frantic worries. Like the kid’s mom in _Stranger Things_ worried. 

Fifteen pairs of socks is enough, and you’ll be doing laundry about once a week? Right? 

Even if the band decides to get theirs dry-cleaned by the hotel, you know how to use a laundromat. You’re not famous, so it’ll be fine. Aradia hums as you continue down your list, intermittently scrolling down the page on her phone. Her nails click lightly against the screen. It’s a pleasant backdrop. 

“The band likes me, and I get along with them, and this is also work. It’s a work trip,” you say, tucking your socks into one of the zipper pouches on the inside of the case’s lid. “I’m getting paid for being there.” 

“Mhm.” 

“You’ll be keeping an eye on my place, but I’m bringing all my most important stuff with me anyway.” 

“Mhm.” 

“I have my keys, laptop, cord, phone, charger, camera, camera bag, toiletries, toothbrush and paste…” 

“Yep.” 

“Ten t-shirts, three pairs of jeans, pajama shirts, pretty much all my underwear…”

You’re folding your pants as you speak, and laying them down atop your lounge pants and shorts. 

“…nice shirts for possible meeting, jewelry, watch, hair scarf, nice shoes, tennis shoes, sandals…”

Your nice shoes are in their own bag, tucked into the other zipper pouch on the top of the bag. Your phone has most of your business in it, and both your phone and laptop can play movies or hold books on them. Modern traveling is so light, compared to even ten years ago. 

“I read your list, and we checked everything off,” Aradia says, from the bed. Her legs uncross, then re-cross in the opposite direction. Cans stretches, stands, turns, and rolls back into a loaf on your ‘rail’s stomach. 

“Yeah, you did,” you say, and still you look over your bags again. The pants were the last thing, since your camera stuff and entertainment are in a bag of their own. 

Cans is already wearing her harness, and her stuff is ready to go. Your pillow goes on top of everything else, and you close the bag. It’s not as hard to zip as you’d thought. Maybe you forgot something? But. 

“You didn’t forget anything, Dave,” Aradia hums, and you glance up at her. She’s sitting up, now, cat safely deposited in the warm spot she’d been occupying. There’s a tiny crease in her brow, and as soon as you look at it, she’s brushing her bangs forward. 

Aradia isn’t worried, but there’s something else in her. 

Instantly, negative thoughts pour into your brain. 

You’re already a little overwhelmed by your travel anxiety, and even though you can feel the weight of it in your pocket, you feel like your wallet’s been stolen before you had a chance to protect yourself. Aradia is upset. What did you do? Did you not listen to her closely enough? Her birthday isn’t coming yet, is it? You don’t need a coat for the trip but you have a jacket. Did she want you to take hers, instead? 

“Dave,” she barks, getting your attention. 

Right. Focusing a little too much internally. 

Breathe. 

“I’m fine,” she says. And it’s like she’s read your mind. “I’m going to miss you, is all.”

The sudden sobriety of her tone catches you off guard. At the same time, it makes you feel like a balloon that’s been stopped just before exploding. The helium tank shut off at just the right second. 

Gradually, the air seeps out of you. 

The bed creaks as you sit next to her. 

“I’m gonna miss you too,” you reply, without meeting her eyes. “Thank God for phones, huh.”

Aradia’s hand finds yours, and you can feel yourself decompress a little. Just a little. She’s not a miracle worker or anything. But her palm is warm, while your fingers are icy, and she’s solid and there. 

The two of you, as a Thing, are new. You’re both new to having a moirail, and you’re both new to being quite so vulnerable. But part of it feels natural, and trusting her also feels natural. It’s strange, and didn’t really come with any kind of stark realization, or prose. It just _was_ , and you two Were. 

When you get back, there will be a movie marathon and some weird snacks and some nice cuddling. But until then, you’ve got this solidarity. And texting. 

In no time, the moment passes. A little too fast, maybe. 

But Aradia is tightening her grip, and you look up to see her face. She’s grinning in that hokey way she likes to do, eyes just a tad too intense for comfort. 

She’s your comfort, regardless. 

“I will not leave you while you are gone,” she says. “Unless you do something really rude or shitty, of course.” 

The frankness of the statement puts a padlock on your connection. Rather than an ultimatum, or a warning, it’s a promise. Because you won’t do anything shitty. Or rude, by her standards. And she knows this. 

“This is our focus chapter as moirails!” she exclaims, and as usual you’re a little lost on what she’s talking about. But it gets you to smile anyway. 

“Right, so we get to set an example of how we’ll be,” you say. She nods, and you nod. 

A horn honks outside. Time to go.

Time to change your life forever. 

Again.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! i am keeping my epilogue opinions inside! but imma keep writing this haha
> 
> i love u all, ty for reading, also this chapter is exactly 3333 words long according to MWord and i think that's beautiful

Every single time you go on tour, Vriska wants to take a camping trip. 

“It’s a tradition! We need at least one tradition!” she exclaims, like clockwork, thrusting one fist into the air with a map clutched in her palm. 

“To Hell with tradition,” both Sollux and you groan, rolling your eyes, also like clockwork. 

Nepeta and Terezi cheer, already working on their first of many naps in their recliners in the bus. This is _also_ like _clockwork_ , if you hadn’t guessed it yet. Gamzee waves a foot, as usual, from where he’s pretending he knows how to meditate, and Equius is driving. incredibly cryptic human guy is driving the sleeper bus. He’s requested that you all call him ‘scratch’. He’s under strict contract and has driven the lot of you many times before.

Dave has already sworn that not all humans are that weird, and that he’s not even convinced of the guy’s species. 

But since Dave is the only part of the situation that isn’t moving like a fuckin timepiece, like everyone else, you’re going to leave that portion of things up to fate. 

The party is something you don’t remember a whole ton of. Not because you were just incredibly wasted, but because you tend to go into a singular state of mind when you’re socializing with other musicians. For some reason, that’s always _your_ job at those parties, is to be hospitable with other people like you. 

Regardless of your lack of memory, you recall Dave leaving, looking a little wired. Or shaken, or something. It’s such an interest to your mind that you allow yourself to dismiss the fact that you were being nice to him at the event. Mostly nice, at least. 

He really doesn’t like the spotlight, that much is true. 

You’ve been on the road for an hour now, and he hasn’t done or said much outside of putting his bags up. In fact, he hasn’t even noticed your staring. 

Maybe he has, and his shades are blocking you from seeing his eyes. 

Dave’s got a little journal open, and he’s writing something in it. Is it notes for the tour? You know he consulted the little book a couple times while doing the shoot at the abandoned theater. Was it for notes? A couple times now, he’s picked up his phone, typed a thing or two, and then slid it back into his camera bag. 

A sharp elbow gets you in the shoulder. 

Hissing, you turn toward Sollux. He’s got one eyebrow raised, and you know what he’s going to suggest without him speaking a single word. It means absolutely fucking nothing that you were staring at Dave.

“We are going to be camping on the ground, this time,” Vriska is saying, when you pointedly look back to her. “So that you chumps can understand just how comfortable your travel beds truly are.”

This time, all of you groan. She makes a delighted face. 

“We will also have a grill for some Loaf I bought special,” she continues, pulling out the clipboard that never leaves her fucking hand. Most of you are wearing joggers, but she’s wearing jean shorts and a hoodie. A pen appears from somewhere inside the hoodie pocket. “And I have supplies to get Scratch to make us a bonfire.” 

“Just call him Steve!” you protest, crossing your arms. “Playing into his game just makes him creepier.”

“He’s been a really good driver for us over the past few years,” she retorts, reaching out and aiming to smack you with the clipboard atop your head. “And I’m gonna do whatever the fuck I want.” 

“Can’t we just leave Vriska on the curb?” you ask. 

No one responds. 

She looks triumphant. 

“Remember to practice and go over your setlist, guys,” she says, before flopping down into the passenger seat. 

Nepeta and Terezi put in their earplugs. 

Gamzee begins to hum.

Sollux snorts, and slips his headphones on. He slides you your favorite start-of-tour companion, troll Pride and Prejudice. Which is what it’s called. Since you’re not a fucking psychopath, and descriptive titles went out of style decades ago.

Like fucking Clock –

Dave sighs a bit, and turns his head to look out the window.

His cat, completely and totally comfortable with the situation already, sits up in his lap. Her harness is admittedly really cute. It’s pink, and covered in little cartoon fish. 

Right. The cat. You’d almost forgotten. 

Cans stretches, arches her back, yawns, and then turns a circle before settling down again. Dave’s hand goes to the top of her head, and he scratches her absently. A soothing purring noise resonates loudly for a bit, before flattening back out and blending in with the road noise. 

Dave hums a note, and leans back. Still in thought, but a bit less tense. 

Still weird, though. 

Still weird. 

\----------

At the campsite, you all finish setting up by mid-afternoon. The weather is perfect, you’re planted out beneath some lovely shade trees, and there were barely any rocks to move on the ground. 

Gamzee’s in a hammock, already napping in his own personal patch of warmth. Cans is roosted on Dave’s shoulders, harness held loosely in one of his hands while he totes his new sleeping bag to his tent. Terezi and Vriska are play-jousting with tent-poles. Nepeta is chasing a butterfly. 

Equius offered to set up your tent for you, when Sollux just sat on a large stump and went straight back to his phone. But you got it done in no time, and now you’re just kind of watching your bandmates fuck around. Sure, you’re not helping anyone else, but it’s not your fault that they’re just not as good at tents as you. 

Frankly, you might just be the best. 

“Hyaa!” Terezi calls out, switching from pole-lance to pole-saber in a matter of seconds. Vriska deflects easily, and you roll your eyes. 

In the four hours of driving, you mostly didn’t do anything. You got some reading done, but didn’t bother with rehearsal. Dave at one point had a decent conversation with Nepeta about her angles and how her crescendos could use more drama. That’s something you’d thought of before, too, but hadn’t succeeded in getting through to her. 

Terezi looked fascinated by the subject, and even took out her headphones for a minute to listen. The sleep mask she was using (just for cool points, probably) got flipped up, and she turned her head for a better angle at the noise. 

It made you prickle, a bit, that they were listening to him. It took you a good while to get listened to, and you’re their glubforsaken _leader_. 

At the moment, he’s leaning forward and tossing out the length of the sleeping bag. Cans immediately pounces on it. Nothing short of pure manic cat-crazy is filling her eyes as she dives between the layers, tunneling into the fabric like nothing has ever been quite so entertaining. 

When you glance back up at Dave, he’s smiling fondly. 

This cat is probably one of the only things that he’s had as a constant, for awhile. He adores her. 

Adoration is nice on his face. 

Fuck. 

Terezi’s pole flies out of her hand, and you hear it whirl as it whizzes past your nose. It misses you by a hair, and you see your life flash before your eyes. 

“Watch it!” you shout instinctively, and whip around to find that neither of them are looking at you. Vriska looks very focused, suddenly, on feeding the pole through the tent’s supports. Terezi is looking up, and whistling tunelessly. 

“You wanna get the wood into that fire pit?” you hear from your left. 

Sunglasses opaque, Dave is standing with his body turned toward you. Cans is curiously still, perched on one of his shoulders. Her claws are digging into his jean jacket, and it looks kinda painful. But maybe he’s used to it? 

“Fuck no,” you reply, and shake your head before rising to your feet. Dave looks confused for a split second before he seems to realize your intent to help. 

“Playing hard to get, now, huh?” he mutters, and you might just kill him. 

\----------

“Tell a ghost story!” Terezi exclaims. Chocolate is kinda forming a melted ring around her mouth. In the same way a baby would have ninety percent of a cupcake’s frosting on their cheeks. 

But the baby probably wouldn’t eat an entire twenty-one s’mores. 

Terezi is unflappable. 

You’re convinced the mess is just there to spite Vriska, who kept trying to rub it off earlier with her thumb. 

Unfortunately, Nepeta caught onto the trend, thinking it was obviously the best fucking thing ever. So she’s also got a lot of sugar on her face. She used it to make little cat lips. Dave looks more than mildly perturbed, as far as his facial expressions go. 

On the Regular Goddamn Person scale, he seems a slight surprised, or like he barely caught a whiff of a bad smell. On the Dave Strider Scale, he appears (face-wise) as if he has stuck his hand in a bucket of genetic material that’s been sitting out for a couple weeks. 

Nice and chunky.

Equius is sitting at the ready with a cleansing towlette, for whenever Nepeta realizes how much this’ll fuck up her complexion. Sollux thinks it’s hilarious. Gamzee is passed out on a log. Scratch, the creepy fuck, is pretending not to watch the lot of you from where he’s leaning against a tree with his hat just barely covering his eyes. 

There are a few spiked ciders sitting around the campfire. The flames billow and burst, and the logs crackle. Dave shifts next to you. His camp chair creaks in the way that only cheap plastic can, and he sighs. Takes another drink out of the corner of your eye. He’s had that, and a couple of mixed drinks. You’re not sure what human alcohol tolerance is like, but you remember how toasty he got from just the one drink at the party. 

“I really _do_ wish we could get on a plane instead,” Nepeta sighs, licking her chops. The garbage from a couple packages of hot dogs and buns litters the ground nearby. You’ll pick it up before the end of the night. Probably after everyone goes to bed. 

Terezi, bereft of her scary story, decides to start singing. Nepeta joins in, and then Sollux, and you put your head in your hands. No clue how these guys got to be so goddamn famous. They sound like ten goats going through an industrial woodchipper. Like the t-rex, from Jurassic Park, slowed down. Gamzee starts to hum, and suddenly they’re a group of deaf Tibetan Throat Singers. 

It’s only just gotten entirely dark outside.

Way too early for this.

Vriska pulls a bottle from her bag. It looks like vodka, but you’re not a hundred percent sure. She raises it, shouts something unintelligible, and then takes a swig. Terezi and Nepeta cheer. For three people who barely spoke before the band thing, they support each other a lot. 

You know they took Terezi’s ‘side’ during the breakup. It’s easy to not blame them for that. Not one bit. They also pulled her out of her brief stint of alcoholism. They helped Equius find her, in a meth den, in upper Manhattan. It was a super-elite-drug-lounge kind of thing. Illegal shit that can kill you, like shooting up liquid gold with a guest list fancier than a Micheal Kors show. 

She wasn’t the same, after Gamzee. 

But somehow, she can be near him. You still don’t get that part.

She doesn’t look at him, she doesn’t talk to him, and he barely even considers her presence most days. But she’s still here. 

Why did she come back? 

A couple of weeks ago, you walked in on a kind of intimate scene. Dave was there, and he and Terezi were sitting on a production couch in the main studio. She was drawing invisible patterns on her guitar. He was holding her hand, and rubbing the back of it with his thumb.

From the way her face was wrenched, she was talking about That Time. When she hit rock bottom, and the band nearly split. 

She’d been so thin. Wasting away to drugs, and to abuse, and to being in a relationship that’d only filled her heart with poison. Vividly you remember watching that dissolution happen. Like bone atrophy. Her ribs had been visible. Her hips, no matter how many times you’d feed her, stuck out like glass. Her fingers had shaken, no matter how much you’d warmed her with your own heat. Her eyes had stopped meeting yours. 

Terezi barely touched you, but you pined for her. She slept curled against the wall, even on your queen-size bed.

The pity you felt for her was incredible. 

So beautiful, and so fragile. 

Leaning on you. 

Making you feel important and needed. 

But in that studio, she wasn’t leaning on Dave. He was holding her hand, being her anchor. Acting as you never could. Humans. They have this knack. 

And in Dave’s eyes, through the gap in his shades, there was recognition and sympathy. Empathy. He could relate to her in a way that was impossible for you. 

It made you feel angry, and shitty. 

Back in the present, the bottle of vodka passes through your hands. Dave hands it over gingerly, choking down his own gulp. He bumps his fist against his chest, wheezing a little. Okay, so it’s strong. 

Yep. 

As you drink, you recognize the feeling of instantaneous regret. Dave, after a cough, laughs out loud at the face you’re making. 

Rolling your eyes, you pass the bottle to your moirail. 

Sollux places his palm between your shoulder blades for a moment before taking it. Good feeling. Good touch. 

The moment dissolves from there. It seeps, fetid, into the blackness of the night sky, the brightness of the stars, and the foulness of memory. Sparks rise from the bonfire, everyone sings and tells stories and leaves you alone. It’s what you want from the moment. It’s surprisingly clandestine, and you have a feeling you’re going to recall it as a pleasant haze. 

“Hey, where did Dave go?” Terezi asks. 

Looking around, you find he’s actually gone. How she figures these things without eyesight is no small wonder to you. 

“He’s probably sleeping,” Vriska says, taking a sip of the bottle dregs.

Sollux prods your shoulder with two fingers, and then leans forward once more to stare into the light. Definitely not good for his eyes. But whatever. 

“Go check on him, make sure he made it to his tent,” Sollux mutters, and you roll your eyes. 

“He’s not a kid,” you reply, “He’s perfectly capable of fondling his nubs on his own time.” 

Sollux gives you a significant look, then. He knows that you’re not just shuffling your feet because you’ve got an itch to dance. You get up and check on everyone, every campout, before bed. It’s kind of your thing. And he knows you’re standing up to do just that. 

“Yeah, fine,” you say, and shove him off the log. Sollux lays on the ground, chuckling, and you press your bottle of water into his hands. He makes half a diamond, and you match it. 

As always. 

You feel eyes on your back as you walk toward Dave’s tent on the far side of the clearing. The feeling goes away, and you breathe a sigh of relief. But, as you round the tent, there’s no sign of Dave. Cans, for sure, is curled into a nice little roll on the softness of the sleeping bag. But her dad is nowhere to be found. 

Huh. 

There’s a very convenient set of footsteps in the dirt, so you go in that direction. He really can’t be far.

The trees give way to rocks, and the rocks give way to sparse vegetation and boulders that sit still on the rim of a cliff. Oh god. What? 

You can only think of his weird behavior, and how he’d looked so shaken before.

Your heart beats impossibly fast for a moment, before you look down and realize that it’s less of a cliff, and more of a steep hill. That in itself is some comfort. And, out of the darkness is floating a sound that’s not quite nature-made. A gentle humming, one of your slow songs. It’s one of the sad ones, but not melancholy enough to be a funeral dirge. 

“Dave?” you call.

The humming stops, and a blonde head pokes out from behind a boulder. It’s fuzzed out on the edges, silhouetted against the moonlight and the valley below. His hand flies out, as if to wave, but he very swiftly overbalances and then straightens with a giggle. 

Cool, so he’s really drunk. 

But at least he’s okay.

The head disappears, and so does the hand, and the humming starts again. It’s a different one this time, one of the really old ones where all you sang about was your friends and your dad. Old times. Against your better judgement, but obviously for the safety of a member of your crew, you step forward. 

Dave is sitting sort of cross-legged, gazing down on a near-impossible view of the river below. He’s bumping his head a little, thumping a thumb on one of his knock knees. He looks more at peace than you’ve seen him in weeks. 

After a minute or two, you silently descend to sit next to him. 

Dave doesn’t seem surprised.

Wordlessly, you join him in the legs-crossed-club. 

“It’s a lot to handle,” Dave says, out of nowhere. It’s so different from the humming that you start at first, placing a hand on your chest and taking a second to think about the meaning of the words he’s said. 

It turns out, however, you don’t need to. 

“The gig, I mean,” Dave continues after a pause. You take the moment to uncross your legs. Right. 

The rock is still warm from the daytime sun, and it feels extremely nice on your spine. 

“The fuck you telling me for?” you ask. “I know that already.”

Dave makes a noise. 

It’s this small noise, not a lot bigger than a dormouse, and you think you maybe could have imagined it into being.

Looking over at his face, of course, tells you nothing. 

Then he pushes his shades up onto his head. 

Dave’s eyes are hardened, and wistful at the same time. A little glassy, because of the alcohol, but still thinking. Always thinking. Never soft. It reminds you a lot of yourself. 

He’s an infinitesimal pool of auburn in the moonlight.

“I just didn’t want you guys to think, that,” he says, and stammers a little. Alcohol or nerves? “That I don’t know that it’s a big deal to work with y’all.”

You’re a little surprised by the comment. Other than him talking, it’s quiet. And the rest of his words are truly something to consider. 

“It’s changing my life a lot, in a good way,” he finishes.

Still a little surprised, and maybe a tad confused, you remain quiet for a bit longer. Dave simply breathes as the moments pass, one after the other. They follow their mother around the cliffside like ducklings. It’s peaceful, but deafening silence. 

“Okay,” is all you say. That’s it. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you see Dave nod. A shift happens, and he’s suddenly a lot closer to you. You’re nudged by a pretty insistent elbow, and the crickets are suddenly so very loud you think your heart might be moving as fast as their legs. 

“Thanks,” Dave murmurs. And moves back to put a scant three inches between you again. 

It’s weird. 

The whole thing is weird. 

But Dave just kind of stands up, and walks off. His gait is a little slow, but not too clumsy. 

He belches. 

Okay. I guess?


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey yall <3 
> 
> the song in this chapter is You're Not Alone by Saosin. im taking myself all the way back to middle school rofl
> 
> as usual, i love u all, and this time would appreciate pointing out typos and stuff cause i didn't feel okay enough to edit. thank you and enjoy!

Vriska is making you design a banner for the show. 

The show tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s show. 

The show that will be tomorrow that requires a banner by tomorrow.

She’s gonna email the PDF of it to her guy she knows, and he’s gonna make it into a full-size banner to line the fence outside the stage. For this particular fence, she says, she needs something that will look good at forty fucking feet long, and six feet tall. 

By tomorrow. 

Terezi had asked for a hangout sesh, citing ‘coolness lessons’ as her reasoning. But apparently her spare hours between rehearsals will be dedicated to something else. 

Because Vriska wants a banner by tomorrow. 

Eighteen hours from now, this moment. 

The pressure by itself is enough to slow your work down, as well, and that’s just terrific. There’s a lot riding on this, apparently. Vriska had been thumbing through the different things, and realized with mounting, shrieking horror, that she had forgotten the fucking fence banner. Which, you’re sure has another name but she’s been panicking about it for an hour now and the only thing she’s been telling you is ‘entry banner’. 

So it’s a goddamn wall banner. 

It’s gonna get printed on matte, weatherproof, heavy-duty vinyl, with grommets along the top and bottom. For you, that means you need to set it in the center, but make it look not cheesy. 

_Don’t they have a department for this?_

Vriska said they didn’t anymore, and made a phone call, and you’re honestly kinda scared. 

When Karkat heard, he cackled in a very gross way for a full minute, then went back to organizing cues. 

Gamzee was being hard to train, apparently. And their set list was different this tour, so he was needing some very heavy-handed teaching moments. 

Cans is sitting in front of you, eyes closed as she basks in a sunbeam that shines through the window of the moving bus. Every second or so, one of her ears twitches. She’s sitting up straight, head tilted back and forelegs straight. The bus rocks her almost imperceptibly, and every so often one of her whiskers waggles in the light. Staring at her for a moment gives you a little added strength, and you force yourself to take a few deep breaths. 

It’s no problem. Everything is going to be fine, probably. 

Anything you create can’t possibly be worse than their banner from last year, anyway. You’re looking at a thumbnail of it, now. And at the show you went to, where you met them with Aradia? You don’t even remember what it looked like. So it can’t have been good. 

While you take those moments of breathing and silence, you tune out Vriska and glance around the cabin.

Terezi, you notice, is sitting a full three feet away from Gamzee. It’s not something you’d even cared to see before. She also keeps her distance from Karkat, on a general level. While she’s always up in your grill, leaning on you and propping her feet on your lap and shit, she doesn’t do that with either of them. A couple times you’ve seen Karkat’s face holding something indescribable. When he sees, you mean. 

From that first night of research and delving into the darkweb of Castejacket’s history, you briefly remember some shit. Some legal trouble, rehab, so on. Can’t remember which one of them it was. It had filed away very swiftly in your mind as a ‘none of your business’ fact. Lost forever in the deep conclaves of Davebrain. 

You were gonna look at more shit, but suddenly Vriska is in your face. You’re forced to tune her back in when she starts shouting about how you really need to be working, Strider. And yeah, yeah, okay. 

Maybe you do. 

_____

“The venue is a stadium, this time. Very populous area,” Karkat is saying. You’re about an hour out from the place, and five hours out from the show. 

You haven’t slept.

Up all night working, with coffee provided in a steady stream and mandated bathroom breaks. 

Everyone has a fresh bottle of water in their hand, and a couple of them are even drinking from it. Equius looks tired, which is understandable given that he’s been driving. 

It’s like… light? Outside? Maybe. 

You feel awful, but wired. Like you’re living on unicorn blood, just barely not dead. Like your soul is about to collapse like a dying star. Like your fingers are shaking, and you’re not even paying attention, fixated on the scripting positioned in the bottom left hand corner of the now-proportioned canvas. 

Eyes burning, you erase the last thread of inconsistency in the kerning of the capitals. 

And a hand shoots out, snatching the tablet from your hands. 

The computer is the next thing to leave, and you remember that the like. Right. 

Blinking is a thing you can do.

How long has cans been sitting on your shoulders? 

She moves as you sit up a little straighter, shrieking a little at the person who stole your baby. A ‘mrp’ comes from her direction, and Vriska is looming over you. She saves the file, and somehow, before you can do fuckin _anything_ , she’s clicked a few buttons on the laptop and emailed the thing to herself. 

On the screen sits your ‘masterpiece’, and she stares at it, nodding. You can’t tell if she’s satisfied or laughing at you. 

Probably both. 

You whine a bit, and you hear Karkat say something incredibly derisive before Terezi slaps the back of his head. Vriska says a couple of things you won’t remember later. The only thing you know is that your heart just stopped a bit, and your left foot is asleep. 

“Remember to watch him, and put him to work today,” Vriska says. 

And oh. Right. 

Are they their own crew? 

They have people they hire at venues to assist with location-based stuff, but. 

“That makes sense. Trolls are really strong, huh,” you mutter. 

Nepeta sits next to you and giggles. 

She pokes the side of your face. 

“Humans. Can’t even make it through one all-nighter without going stupid,” Sollux mutters, from where he’s shifting through a box of cords. “I’ll use him.”

A grey hand waves in front of your eyes, and then you’re looking at Cans. 

Well, you’re looking at her paws as she chases the bracelets on Vriska’s right wrist. And then her butthole. She does this thing where she’ll rub her whole body against something, turn a circle, and repeat ad infinitum. 

You love her. 

“Silly baby,” Nepeta coos, and picks her up. 

Cans meeps. 

Vriska scoffs. 

Everything fuzzes out again, and you kind of notice someone plunking a cold bottle of water in front of you, and taking away your coffee. Surely you’ve left an impression of your ass in this tour bus seat. Somewhere in the peripheral of your brain you notice Vriska showing the poster to people, and saying if its reception is positive enough she might make it into a shirt or something. 

It’s all kind of a blur in the face of your incredibly huge wave of dread that comes with every finished project.

Something _you_ made, and _you_ finished, is going to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people eventually. Holy shit. 

Hoooooly shit. 

_____

Sollux definitely puts you to work. 

He’s got you stringing cables, walking wires to and from the stage. The huge amount of cords is kind of silly, especially considering that they have a little speed bump-lookin’ thing that covers them all and prevents tripping. And they’re heavy. 

Fuck, these cords are heavy. 

Sollux sits up on the stage, splaying out the sound equipment like he’s unraveling a conspiracy theory. 

There are like four different types of speakers. Two are human, but two are troll-specific. They transfer and amplify some noises that humans can’t hear, or don’t care about. Apparently, as you are informed when you ask, ‘every troll band or musician has these, and some of them have even more’. It’s an intimidating thought. 

But while you’re doing grunt labor, and plugging in some certain things, and shifting pedals and locking in drums, you’re listening. 

Around you, most of the stadium’s crew is aliens. 

A lot of them speak in the more ‘native’ Alternian, and some of it is almost like Troll Spanglish. It’s wild to listen to, and kind of soothing in the non-understandability of it. It rolls past your head in waves. 

“Hey Dave!” you hear your name called, and scamper over to the stage. 

Four hours passed a lot faster than you think. 

The sun, through the wide field-entrance-tunnel, has begun to descend. Sollux is putting the equipment up on stands, and telling you to press the correct wires and buttons. Lights are being tested above, and the stage is hot as fuck. 

Nepeta comes by in a tank top that reveals a lot of surprisingly un-tatted skin. A bit of hair is poking out the neckline, and her fingers are covered in little golden bands.

She tests her sound, and you know you’re only an hour from go-time, now. 

Gamzee is sat on a crossbeam above the stage, and Vriska and Karkat are trying to get him to come down as if this is something that regularly occurs. 

Nepeta tests not only her own instrument, but also Karkat’s, and Gamzee’s. The drums were done earlier, so they’re quiet while Terezi taps her sticks backstage. 

“Cans is in the bus, right?” you ask, and Nepeta snorts. 

“For the fifth time, yes,” she says, and Sollux gives her a thumbs-up. The black axe looks odd against her clothes. That’s Karkat’s, right? Known mutant but still uses a non-blood guitar. 

There’s a clamoring from behind you, and you know that the stadium has been opened. 

Vriska steps up on stage to wave the five of you out of the light. Karkat has managed to get his ex out of the ceiling, and is sternly marching him off. 

The sounds of people get louder and louder, and your face is thudding heat and your heart is pounding with excitement. Your brain is still a black hole. 

Karkat gets in some last minute cue reminders, and Vriska yells at about thirty people about everything, and Nepeta chugs an energy drink and something else you don’t recognize. There’s no introduction, no one telling all the people what they’re waiting for, or anything. And Gamzee strides up the stairs and out in front of them. 

The sound is almost deafening. There’s a deep buzzing from what Terezi says, rolling her eyes, are the magic lumpkin clown church. 

Then she goes out there, and the sounds are a lot more… interesting. Karkat’s face turns red, and you wonder what the fuck they’re doing. From the sounds of the crowd, it’s not all-trolls like the last show. 

Sollux pats him on the shoulder, laughing, and the two of them leave you standing there behind the stage alone. 

But you have to see. 

Vriska is up there on the stage, standing just out of view in the back corner by Sollux. 

Everything is weirdly surreal, and you look out on the crowd. The lights are so fucking bright. 

Fans are a cacophony of cheering, even as Karkat calls them annoying and tries to shut them up. 

It doesn’t work.

“Hey guys, I’m gonna start with a song you all know,” he says. Metal flashing in his face, and on his hands. The same ugly baggy sweater as last time. From behind him, you can see light peeking through the holes. “It’s a poem I wrote when I was fourteen. A melodramatic fuck. Just like all of you.” 

A few fans whistle amid the next wave of cheers.

Before you know it, their first song is starting. 

With a wave of one of Karkat’s hands, months and months of planning come into fruition. 

Vriska, beside you, heaves a great big sigh of relief. 

_”It’s just like him,”_ Karkat sings. _”To wander off in the evergreen park.”_

It’s an understatement to say that the floor beyond the stage seems to explode. 

It ripples and churns as trolls and humans try to scream above the sound of the music. The spotlights streaming down on them, the halo around the profile of Karkat’s mouth as he sings loud, close to the microphone as before. You see tall trolls, short trolls, trolls with metal through their horns and skin. Humans alive, with mohawks and black-slick-dyed-hair and pale skin and darker skin, like yours. 

Cameras flash and you’re temporarily blinded. 

“Next show, you’re taking some pics for posters,” Vriska nearly-screams in your ear. 

All you can do is dumbly nod. 

Karkat throws his guitar behind his back, leaving the playing to Nepeta. Her fingers dance in incredibly talented ways, long and nimble. 

Karkat grips the microphone with both hands, and leans into it. 

The fans echo right back at him. 

**_”You’re not alone,”_** he sings. In his wonderfully gravelly-smooth voice **_”There is more to this I know; you can make it out – you will live to tell.”_**

He slams his head forward, hair flying around his pointed ears. 

The midnight crowd ripples with the passion of the music, hands flying in the air and strobes pulsing over the oceans of song. 

“Holy fuck,” you whisper. 

Karkat looks back at you, for a split second. 

He grins. 

A glint of something flinty strikes through his eyes as he turns to face you, and mouths a couple words. It’s – you didn’t catch it. Shit.


End file.
